Reorganise your bedroom

Every child will want to re-organise or re-decorate their room at some point. And if this means buying new furniture (like a study desk or a bookshelf) or moving existing pieces around things around, they'll need to do the measurements. It’s time to get out the tape measure. What fits where?

Things you need

Tape measure
A room ready to be re-organised
Furniture store catalogue or website (optional).

The challenge

If your child is looking to do a spot of room re-organisation they’ll need to bring maths into the equation, specifically length and area.

Start by discussing how they want their room to look. They’ll need to use a tape measure to determine how much space they have and create a floor plan. Do they have enough space in their room to rearrange their belongings or add new furniture where they want?

The conversation

These discussions will be ongoing during the activity:

"What do you need to know before creating your floor plan and re-designing your room?"
"What problems did you run into?"
"How much bigger would your room need to be to fit all the furniture you want?"
"Can you move any existing pieecs of furniture around to make it fit?"
"What's the difference between centimetres and metres?"
"Is it better to measure the width of the bed in centimetres or metres? Why?"

The career

Knowing how to measure a space correctly has many different career applications. Set designers for films, concerts, events and theatre productions will be using this skill on a daily basis, as will town planners, builders, business owners, interior designers, property developers, real estate agents, stylists, landscapers and more.