Potato Mountain Topography

While doing the potato mountain topography, I learned that increments or intervals are used to represent landforms in topographical maps. Furthermore, this activity helped me better understand topographical maps. A mountain's topographical map would include contour lines that resemble the mountain's shape at increments of 10, 50, or 100 feet depending on the altitude of the mountain. The half potato I cut out for this activity represents a mountain range.

We first took a large potato and cut it in half, which represents my mountain. I kept one half of a potato for myself and gave the other half of my mountain to my group. Moreover, I later cut the potato into 4 horizontal layers.

I later took each horizontal layer of my potato and traced it onto a blue colored piece of paper.

I later made another identical copy of the cut-out/traced layers of potato (in order to make a double layer of the shape in cardboard) and glued it onto a piece of cardboard.

Finally, I glued the layers of cardboard together.

I later glued my potato mountain along with my other group member's potato onto the shoebox and we later plastered the interior of the shoebox.