You might present a scenario where students are working for a company, and ask them what they need to consider when selecting which net to use. Their responses could include wanting to spend a minimal amount of money on the cardboard for making the boxes and also wanting a minimal amount of waste.

Students should have worked with and discussed hexominos. They also should have previous experience with area and transformations. If students have worked with geometric shapes, such as tangrams, this is a good activity for extending the spatial visualization concept of seeing how pieces fit together to make a whole.

Area, spatial visualization, relationships among geometric shapes, and tessellations.

Representation: Students will need to represent their ideas by making models of the various hexomino nets and exploring how they fit together with the least amount of waste.

Communication: Students need to discuss the relationships between the nets, ask questions, and answer one another's questions about the nets as they try to find the net that will cover the roll of paper with the least amount of waste.

Reasoning and Proof: Students need to reason about the shape of each net and how it will tessellate to cover the plane surface.

Problem Solving: Students need to use various strategies to approach this problem. Making a model, solving a simpler problem, and identifying provided and required information, are all samples of the strategies that students might use.