Saw this great post from Patrick Honner today:
I am also a huge fan of using 3D Printing to help kids learn math. A few fun projects have been:
(1) Using Laura Taalman’s 3D Printed Pentagons to Talk Math with Kids
This project explores the 15 pentagon patterns that can tile the plane – including the one that was discovered in 2015.
(2) A fun fractal project – exploring the Gosper curve
This project explores the Gosper curve – a fractal that shows kids that tripling the size of an object doesn’t always increase the area by a factor of 9. Quite a surprise to kids learning geometry 🙂
Both of these first two projects used models that we found on Thingiverse. We’ve also done a few projects where we made our own shapes in Mathematica:
(3) James Tanton’s Geometry Problem and 3D printing
This project really showed me how 3D printing can help make a difficult problem a little easier.
(4) A Cool Geometry Problem Shared by Tina Cardone
One fun thing about this project was that it shows that 3D printing can also help you think about 2D geometry.
This project explores a neat (and unsolved) problem that Steven Strogatz shared on Twitter.
(6) 3D Printing and Negative Space
This last one is super fun and the Prince Rupert problem is a great initial problem for kids learning about 3D printing.
We have nearly 30 projects with the “3D Printing” tag. Hopefully the ones linked above give a glimpse into some of the math-related fun you can have with 3D printing. I hope that these printers will be in more and more schools soon!
Mike's Math Page 