Saw a neat page in our Zome Geometry book last night:
Today we tried making a few of these shapes. The first was the non-convex pentagon tiling first:
A few thoughts from the kids:
Kid 1: (6th grade boy) The pattern keeps changing. We never saw the “one straight” until [pointing to the figure] here, and we never saw the “three straight” until here.
Kid 2: (6th grade girl): I think it is cool how the pattern seems like it isn’t going to work and then it fixes itself.
Kid 3: (4th grade boy) It is really interesting ’cause of the patterns. They almost discontinue, but then we saw something that helped us fix it.
Next we tried for a shape with Penrose tiles – I actually didn’t know that you could make the Penrose darts and kites out of Zome struts.
A few thoughts from the kids:
Kid 1: I think the shape has 3 fold symmetry and also two fold symmetry.
Kid 2: I’d never seen the Penrose shapes before and it cool how you can flip them. If you take the kite and reverse the part pointing out, you get the dart.
Kid 3: There are two different versions of the (zome) stars. That made building the shape hard.
Also, we’d played with Penrose tiles once before as a 3D printing project:
Penrose tiles and some simple 3d variations
And speaking of 3D printing . . . the last thing we did was take a look at Laura Taalman’s 3D printed pentagon program:
Using Laura Taalman’s 3D printed pentagons to talk math with kids
This last part was just for fun, but all three kids were really interested. Taalman’s work here is amazing.
Mike's Math Page 