My mom wanted some shade around the pool so she found the photo below online and tasked my dad and brother-in-law with making it happen.
They were cruising along until I received the following picture from my mom:
They were wanting to figure out the exact angle to cut the front diagonal boards (near the peak) without a few hours of guess and check. They did know that they wanted the length of the diagonal board to be 30 inches. She also sent me a quick sketch:
I observed that it would be close to an isosceles triangle, but my brother-in-law is a perfectionist so I used the Law of Sines to give him 4 decimal places. Here was my work:
The angles worked great and I did a happy dance because I am so excited to use this scenario with my students. Would you have solved it differently?
