Calder Mobile's and City Streets

This week in 8th grade math we are working on our Calder Mobile's.  The students were broken into pairs and they are working on the math portion of the project fair project.  In the pictures posted below the students are using wooden dowels and alligator clips to find balance.  They are asked to add clips to both end and the slide the fulcrum around to find the balance point.  They then measure the distance from the fulcrum to the clips and count the number of clips.  This is called the moment and what they find out is that the moment on one side should be equal to, or close to equal to, the moment on the other side.  We will continue working with the clips for the next two days and then they will apply what they learned to building an actual Calder Mobile in art class.  When we finish the Calder Mobile's we will again work with the Chicago city street grid system.