lesson
Updated 6 days ago · 2 views
Have you ever held a cereal box, a camping tent, or an unsharpened wooden pencil? All of these 3D shapes are part of a special family called prisms.
Every prism has flat sides called faces, straight lines called edges, and pointy corners called vertices (a single corner is a vertex).
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What happens when we look closely at a cereal box and count every single part?
Rectangular Prisms
A cereal box or toy brick is a rectangular prism because all of its sides are rectangles.
Let's count its parts: it has 2 ends and 4 side walls for a total of 6 faces, 4 corners on top and 4 on the bottom making 8 vertices, and 12 edges connecting them all.
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What if the two matching ends are shaped like triangles instead of rectangles?
Triangular Prisms
A camping tent or a slice of cheese is a triangular prism because its front and back ends are matching triangles.
It has 2 triangle ends and 3 rectangle walls for 5 faces, 3 corners in front and 3 in back making 6 vertices, and 9 edges.
📊Interactive diagram