Fawn Nguyen is so great at sharing interesting math problems. On twitter, on her blog, in person, and probably some bat signal type thing if you live in California – she’s got such a great nose for interesting math. By super happy coincidence earlier in the week we were working through oddly similar problems. I wrote about it here:
When My Evening was Similar to Fawn Nguyen’s Evening
This morning I finally got around to doing a quick version of the problem Fawn shared with my kids.
The problem is this: how do you find the volume of a Rhombic Dodecahedron, or as she put it on Twitter:
Here’s the start, just showing what the shape looks like:
Up next is this fun observation from Fawn:
The final step is figuring out the volume of all of those pyramids – you must must must need a formula, after all, this is math we are talking about, right 🙂
I wish I’d been filming the construction of the pyramids inside of the cube, because my younger son’s face when he realized that the 6 pyramids filled the cube was priceless.
A super fun project that actually can be modified to fill a long time or shorter time. Really thankful that Fawn shared this one
Mike's Math Page 