Giving this blogging stuff a shot

I'm about to enter my second year of teaching, and recently I have found an immense amount of fellow math teachers who have a plethora of great stuff online. As my goal is to make what I teach more relevant and thoughtful, I have spent the past month consuming a lot of great ideas from all over the math blogging and twitter community. I enjoy thinking about interesting new ways to create thought provoking learning experiences, and I'd like to start contributing some of my thoughts and ideas. 

This year I'll be teaching Geometry, Algebra, and 7th grade math at a middle school close to home, and I'm excited to use some engaging  projects and problems to get my future students thinking and and working with math in a way that will stick with them. 

The planning starts now, as I try to answer a ton of questions ranging from the logistics of setting up the problems, how am I goi g to asses student work in a meaningful way, and how am I going to make sure that the projects they work on uncover the content that they need to know. 

I welcome all of the feedback that you have to offer, and I look forward to building my toolbox as my career moves on. 

Octagon Table

While visiting family in West Virginia, I came across this table at their river lot. I'm wondering the angle at which the wood was cut. 

I can see this as being a good problem for getting into polygons and how they're built from triangles, and I like the link to carpentry. 

I can see having the students build their own table top with a varying number of sides, and figuring out what angle to cut the wood cross sections.

I'm thinking that this would fall under common core standard G-MG-A.1 or G-SRT-B.5. What do you think, and what would do with this problem?