About a year ago we visited Einstein’s Workshop (known as H3XL at the time) in Lexington, MA to do a “Zome” project. We didn’t know what a Zome project was exactly, but it sounded fun so we drove up. Over the course of about 3 hours several adults and kids build this really neat structure:
Today we visited the Museum of Math in NYC and were reintroduced to the Zometool kits. We bought one of the small sets that were sold in the gift shop and my youngest opened it up the second we got home (I’d actually already bought the boys a larger Zometool kit as a Christmas present, but since I’m a sucker for mathy stuff, an extra kit a few days early was fine with me!).
Before moving on, though, I have to say that the Museum of Math is an absolutely fantastic place to visit. If you happen to find yourself in Manhattan, block out a few hours to spend there. You’ll be glad you did.
In any case, when we got home I hopped on the computer to catch up with work and my youngest son went in the back room to play with the Zometool kit. After about 30 minutes he came into the kitchen and announced that he’d built a hypercube:
How fun. Seems like we’ll be using our Zometool kits for lots of exciting geometry. The obvious lesson that the hypercube presented was a short talk with the boys about dimension:
and then a quick follow with this video we found on youtube that shows a computer generated image of a hypercube moving in space.
A super fun day thanks to Zometool and the Museum of Math!
Mike's Math Page 