Jasper Woodbury Geometry Series engages grades 5–8 students in interactive video adventures that bring geometric concepts to life through real-world problem-solving. Featuring pilot Jasper Woodbury, these three ~15-minute episodes teach scale, area, volume, and triangulation, promoting spatial reasoning, critical thinking, and collaboration. Aligned with Common Core standards, the series includes teacher guides and student worksheets for teacher-led debriefs and extension activities to support classroom integration. Key episode highlights include:
- Blueprint for Success: Students design a playground blueprint, applying scale drawings to calculate area and volume for structures like swings and slides, ensuring the plan meets community specifications and budget constraints, building practical geometric design skills.
- The Right Angle: Students use topographic maps to navigate a terrain challenge, applying triangle properties (e.g., right angles, Pythagorean theorem) to determine distances and angles, simulating field measurements with SMART Tools to enhance visualization.
- The Great Circle Race: Students analyze a global race path on maps, interpreting great circle routes to calculate distances, bearings, and time zones, integrating scale and coordinate geometry to predict race outcomes, fostering global spatial awareness.
Each episode includes three CD-ROMs (story disc, teacher disc, teacher manual disc) with integrated video content (no videotape or DVD included, despite a teacher manual misprint). Available for PCs running Microsoft Windows; Mac OS X is not supported. View the Episode Comparison document below for detailed information on each episode. This series equips educators with dynamic tools to build students’ geometric intuition and problem-solving confidence in middle school math curricula.