MARQUETTE — After taking an overnight trip to Camp Michigamme and playing many fun games of Gaga Ball, a Father Marquette Catholic Academy family and the 6th-grade math class decided the school needed its own Gaga Ball Pit to continue the fun.

One of the student’s parents, Mr. Tuuri, started by finding a template and materials that students could use in their math class to make a plan. He brought plans to the class and discussed the idea of give-and-take for the options on the various templates to get the costs to equalize and decide which to use. Cost (rate) will be a future math lesson and the students will be able to refer back to the project and use it as a real-world example.

Owen Maskart, an FMCA 6th grader, described the game of Gaga Ball.

“He said it’s a game that many people can play at any time of the year — with a little shoveling in the winter,” school officials wrote an in email. “It’s a fast-paced game of hitting a ball back and forth with your fist and if you get hit below the waist with the ball, you are out.”

When asked what his favorite part of doing this for FMCA was, Owen stated, “I learned how to use geometry and teamwork, and my favorite part of building it was the drilling because I like to drill and I have experience doing it.”

The math lesson at the time was learning about polygons: what they are, side and angle information, and the sum of interior angles, which they used to determine what the angle of the Gaga Ball pit corners needed to be. Students discussed the template and design, using them to plan out tasks and responsibilities for each student, from using factors and multiples to decide how many tools would be needed, to prepping drill bits and carrying boards.

“As with any project, unexpected things happened, and the students used teamwork to troubleshoot the problems as they arose and found solutions,” school officials said in an email. The students did all of the work with some adult oversight.

“Another lesson they related to was in their Theology class,” school officials said in the email. “Students recently talked about how when we create some

After it was built, they remeasured and confirmed the side lengths were the same length and the angles for their polygons were correct.

“The FMCA students now have a new Gaga Ball pit for recesses and after-school activities, thanks to their hard teamwork,” school officials said.