DESIGNING A RESTAURANT: ISMS math students engage in architecture project
COLUMBIA CITY — Math students at Indiana Springs Middle School planned, designed and presented an architectural project called Restaurant Possible this week. The program is loosely-based on the popular Food Channel show “Restaurant Impossible.”Math teachers Jill Baker and Cathy Rowe wanted to teach math content that included dimensions and scale.The project culminated with a scale floor plan including the kitchen, rest rooms, waiting areas and an eating area.First the students watched a clip from Restaurant Impossible, where a team goes into a struggling restaurant and with a budget of $10,000, redoes the restaurant to make it a viable business again.Next the students received a letter from “Jane Smith” of “Restaurant Internation-al” of Indianapolis. Although Smith and her company are fictitious, the students bit on the letter requesting them to compete to design the restaurant that a company is planning to build in Columbia City.“We wanted to utilize some design technology in addition to having the students create their floor plans with a pencil and graph paper. We searched on the internet and found some design software for floor plans,” said Rowe.