I was playing around in our Zome Geometry book looking for a project today. Stumbled on chapter 12 in the book about Archimedean solids. Unfortunately as we are currently transitioning between houses, I didn’t have any green zome struts. Luckily we found a few shapes that we could make using only blues.
The goals for today were:
(1) Construct some shapes from seeing their pictures on the computer, and
(2) Have them explain the things that they noticed about with these new shapes.
That noticing and wondering led to the creation of this awesome “snowman” at the end of the project:
We started with the Icosidodcahedron – seen here on Wikipedia:
The Icosidodecahedron on Wikipedia
First what they thought of the shape:
Here are their thoughts after building it:
Next up was the Truncated Icosidodecahedron seen here in Wikipedia:
The Truncated Icosidodecahedron on Wikipedia
Here is their initial reaction to the shape:
and their thoughts after building it – relating these first two shapes led to an interesting conversation.
The final shape we looked at was the Rhombicosidodecahedron, seen here on Wikipedia:
The Rhombicosidodecahedron on Wikipedia
Here’s their initial reaction to the shape:
and their thoughts after building it:
Finally – just for fun – here’s the snowman 🙂
Mike's Math Page 