Third-grade students at Oveta Culp Hobby Elementary School in Fort Hood, Texas, part of the Killeen Independent School District, flew kites during National Kite Month in April to learn a few math lessons, the Fort Hood Herald reports.
“I started this tradition years ago when teaching fifth grade,” the paper quoted their teacher, Janice Huckabee, as saying. She started the kite-flying tradition years back to help students relax, have fun, and develop math skills. “I found it was a great stress relief for students—a break they needed after days of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness testing.”
A “kite” as a quadrilateral
Those math skills include finding the area of a special quadrilateral that goes by the name “kite” (the official mathematical term). Here’s a more technical description from Wolfram MathWorld: “A planar convex quadrilateral consisting of two adjacent sides of length a and the other two sides of length b. The rhombus is a special case of the kite,” where a = b.
The two diagonals of a kite intersect at a right angle, and in our diagram, the diagonal from vertex A to C bisects the other diagonal. At least one diagonal has to be a perpendicular bisector of the other, or it’s not a kite.
The area of a kite is given by ½ h w, where h represents the height of the kite and w the width. That’s because h, the length of the diagonal from vertex A to C in our diagram, is the base of a triangle with a height of one-half the length of the diagonal from vertex D to B. (A triangle’s area is given by ½ b h, and a kite has two of those triangles, one on the left and one on the right.)
Online Resources
You can learn more about quadrilaterals by manipulating them on a GeoBoard or an online pegboard we created using the Mathematica program. (You’ll have to download a free player from Wolfram Research, based in Champaign, Ill., if you don’t have Mathematica, to use our demo.) See our page here.
And teachers, for a worksheet (small quiz) about quadrilaterals, including kites, we found one published online by a California school district, here.