Our last topic for Year 9 was Trigonometry. We called it Perspectives and introduced the topic with a visit from students of the mission teams telling us how the trip had changed their perspective on education and life. We had a curry cooking in the corner for those interested to taste. Food smells invoke creativity and curiosity.
We then started talking about the signs that are projected onto the sporting fields and looked at the Maths involved with the positioning of the camera/projector and so introduced tan. Later we introduced sin and cos and their respective calculations.
As a showcase entry we spent several lessons developing the Maths of perspective drawings of representations of comparisons between Australia and the mission countries- income, death rates, life expectancy etc, and finished by creating chalk drawings around the school for all to see.
Some students were so enthusiastic that they took some chalk home over the weekend to hone their skills for the final production.
Coral Connor's Blog 
[…] Connor’s students created 3D chalk charts to demonstrate their understanding of trig […]
Did you use some sort of scaffold to help them figure this out?
In a fashion. We showed them a number of perspective drawings and practised a few different types. The more keen students took chalk home over the weekend to improve their drawings.