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Surface Areas of Prisms - Lesson 12-1

Today we began to discuss Surface Area. In order to do this, we started by discussing polyhedra:

We then noted that polyhedra are classified by the number of faces. For instance, a 4-faced polyhedrdon is called a tetrahedron:

A 6-faced polyhedron is called a hexahedron:

A 7-faced polyhedron is called a heptahedron:

And a 10-faced polyhedron is called a decahedron:

We then defined a regular polyhedron and showed an example regular dodecahedron:

At this point, we defined a prism and learned what the lateral surface area and the total surface area of these polyhedra were:

Finally, we defined right prism, oblique prism, and altitude of a prism:

At this point, we went through the following examples. First we looked at finding the total surface area of a right rectangular prism:

We then looked at this problem - find the total surface area of the right pentagonal prism shown below:

In order to solve this problem, we looked at the bases and the lateral faces:

These are shapes we know, so we found their area and added them together to get the answer: