Engineering Homes for Cats: One Math Class at a Time

We have all seen them – bodega cats, house cats, community cats. In particular, the community cats lack names and homes, and they will wander your neighborhood looking for food and shelter all hours of the day and night. This winter, third-year Quad Prep math teacher, Melissa Krop , and her middle school students saw an opportunity to apply mathematical concepts in a service-minded way, creating a brand new project: building shelters for these lovable, no-name neighborhood cats.?

In between midterms and Winter Break this past school year, Melissa challenged and motivated her students to identify a project that would be both academically rigorous and service-oriented. After brainstorming as a team and considering all the students’ interests, the class settled on their idea: they would indulge their love of animals and their passion for math, and create these new cat shelters.

Melissa was eager to give students space to delve more deeply into the underlying concepts they’d learned, while exploring the real-world, project-based applications of these concepts. Melissa’s students became not only mathematicians, but also engineers – determining what concepts they would need to learn or draw from to find success. Starting with geometry, the students were able to build a plan for their shelters. Then, using their knowledge of volume and measurement conversion tools, the students determined exactly how much of their building materials they would need. For instance, Melissa posed the question, “You’ll need to fill ? of the shelter with straw in order for there to be adequate insulation. Based on our plan’s measurements, how much straw will you need?”?

Once the amounts for each material needed were determined, students had to consider unit cost and budget planning. This financial extension offered students the opportunity to see math’s real-world applications first-hand. They needed straw for the cat shelters, but what was their best deal based on the budget that they had to work with? How could they make their dollars stretch the furthest? If one item is listed in metric units and another is listed in customary units, how could they convert the quantities to determine their values and get the best deal? These were all questions that they found themselves asking as they uncovered the multidimensional application of a variety of mathematical skills that would transcend their math classroom and become important in so many facets of their postgraduate lives.

“These are standard topics in my class, but now the students got to see a specific application for it in real life. The amount of math that they discovered was necessary was so rewarding – we got to experiment with numbers in a very natural way."

Once the deals were snagged and the materials arrived, the building began. By hot gluing cardboard and foam, covering the structures in waterproof materials, and filling the cozy homes with straw for insulation, the students created three shelters that will make cats in Morningside Park very warm and happy.

“These are standard topics in my class, but now the students got to see a specific application for it in real life. The amount of math that they discovered was necessary was so rewarding – we got to experiment with numbers in a very natural way,” says Melissa. The students certainly seemed to be motivated to discover the mathematical concepts behind this project, and it’s always fulfilling to see students banding together over shared interests and passions. “There were kids in my class who maybe wouldn’t typically choose to work together, but because they all like animals, they were motivated to collaborate and achieve their shared goals. I’m so proud of how well they worked together,” Melissa notes.

This project was an undeniable win-win: these students got to challenge themselves and learn math concepts that they can use in their daily lives, and the community cats get to indulge their evolutionary drive to fit into small spaces for warmth and safety. So, if you see a cat this summer, encourage them to find these well-researched and expertly-engineered cat hotels – and make sure they thank our brilliant Quad Prep students for the accommodations! ?