Math Club Resource Hub

In this hands-on activity, students build their spatial reasoning and connect algebraic thinking to geometry concepts.

Students first use geoboards to construct different polygons (you can also print out some dotty paper) and then investigate the relationship between the number of interior points (I), the number of boundary points (B), and the area of the polygon (A).

By exploring, collecting data, and making conjectures, students can see how the interior and boundary points contribute to the area of a polygon, thereby deriving Pick’s theorem. That is, A = I + B / 2 - 1.