1. Police in Spain have found a man hidden inside a suitcase.
He planned to hide inside the luggage compartment under a coach and steal from other travellers’ suitcases.
Before the coach reached its destination he would climb back inside the suitcase and be carried away by his partner, who was travelling on the coach.

2. El Periodico included this diagram of the plan in which they claim that the man was 1.78 m tall and the case was 90 cm by 50 cm.
How ‘thick’ do you think the case would have to be to fit a 1.78 m man inside?
How about for you to fit inside the case?

3. Wikipedia says that each cubic metre of the average person weighs about 1 000 kg.
How many cubic metres would a 70 kg man fill?
How ‘thick’ would the suitcase have to be to contain that volume?
Does this differ from your earlier estimate? Why might this be?
Design a suitcase with a volume large enough to take a 70 kg man but small enough not to appear suspicious!

4. It’s in the News! A curious case
Teacher Notes

5. Prompts and probing questions
Activity
A Curious Case
Description
This resource is aimed at developing an understanding of volume and practising finding the volume of cuboids. It also has the
potential to practise some of the functional skills, particularly working out where to start on a problem and justifying your
reasoning.
Prompts and probing questions
The PowerPoint has several questions which lead the students towards thinking about the volume of the suitcase. The intention is
not that you use all of these, but pick and choose those that are needed for your class. You might choose to supplement them with
other questions such as:
what does ‘volume’ mean?
if a man ‘curls up’, does his volume change?
what’s the smallest space you could fit into?
is it possible to have more than one case with the same volume?
do you agree or disagree with the statement, “There are 100 cm in 1 m, so there are 100 cm3 in 1 m3”?
Extension
For more able students you might like to consider how much space would be left inside their suitcase once a person was
comfortably (!) inside. What would be the best loot that they could hope for? What would be the largest object that they could fit
in? How many mobile phones (for example) would they be able to fit into the gaps?
If you have appropriately large pieces of card, you might like to make some of the students’ final designs to see which is the most
practical and also to support understanding that the same volume can be shared by different cuboids.
Assessment
If you use the APP model of assessment, then the areas to assess could include:
solve word problems and investigations from a range of contexts (using and applying mathematics level 5).
deduce and use formula for… the volume of a cuboid; calculate volume and surface area of cuboids (shape, space and measure level 6).
solve problems and carry through substantial tasks by breaking them into smaller, more manageable tasks… give solutions to an appropriate degree of accuracy (using and applying mathematics level 6).