Education Technology

Points, Lines, and Planes

Activity Overview

Explore the relationships between points, lines, and planes.

Objectives

  • Students will identify parallel lines and planes.
  • Students will identify perpendicular lines and planes.
  • Students will recognize skew lines.
  • Students will discuss the intersection of planes.

Vocabulary

  • Parallel lines
  • Perpendicular lines
  • Collinear
  • Noncollinear
  • Plane
  • Skew

About the Lesson

This lesson involves use of a cube to represent space. Points and segments flash when clicked. As a result students will:

  • Click on vertices of a cube to identify planes, including an interior plane.
  • Click on segments of a cube to identify parallel, perpendicular, and skew segments.
  • Rotate the cube to visualize the relationships from different perspectives.
  • Manipulate planes in space to show the intersection of two planes is a line, and the intersection of three planes can be a point or a line.