Prism (geometry)

A prism is like a big, flat, see-through box. Imagine a rectangular candy box made of clear glass. When you look through the front of it, you see a rectangle shape, right? But if you walk to the side of the box and look at it, you'll see that the sides of the box make a triangle shape, and are connected to the rectangle faces.

So, what's happening is that the rectangular faces are called "bases" and the sides are called "lateral faces." The bases are always parallel to each other and the lateral faces are always rectangles. If you cut the prism diagonally by slicing at half way between the two bases, you'll see that it's two congruent triangles and three rectangular prisms.

Prisms can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There are triangular prisms, hexagonal prisms, pentagonal prisms, and more! And, it's really cool that you can find prisms all around you. Some common examples are water bottles, tents, and even some buildings have triangular prisms on top of them!