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Mrs. Sherri Jones had her trigonometry students build small models to test different ways that trigonometry can solve problems in the physical world. The makers space was used to help build some of these small models.
This group of ladies made a scale model of a standard one-story house and a standard ladder. They knew what pitch at which the ladder would be safest to lean against a permanent structure, and the length of the house. The problem they recognizes is that it's much harder to eyeball or measure pitches and angles than it is to simply know the distance the the bottom of the ladder should be from the wall of the house. They used math skills of scale and SIN/COS/TAN to determine the distance at which a ladder of a given length would need to be placed to safely reach the roof of the house.
This group build a small catapult to see how far it could propel a given object. They took measurements from the fixed release point to multiple landing points to determine an average then used trigonometry skills to determine the object's average apex height based on its decent point and average landing distance.
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