I was reading a bit more on tilings of 3 space and found these two neat pages on Wikipedia that were related to our tilings with truncated octahedrons:
The “Bitruncated Cubic Honeycomb” article on Wikipedia
The “Cubic Honeycomb” article on Wikipedia
I was a little more interested in the topic than usual since my younger son had made a new “smushed” truncated octahedron after we finished yesterday’s project:
yesterday’s project is here:
Tiling 3 dimensional space with our Zometool set
For today’s project we built some more of the shapes that my younger son built yesterday and explored if these shapes could also tile space. Here is their description of the shape and how it is similar to and different from yesterday’s “smushed” truncated octahedron:
Next we looked at how the “smushed” truncated octahedron and the new shape tiled space:
Finally, I showed the boys the two Wikipedia pages from above so that they could see all of the incredible honeycomb patterns:
So, a fun project inspired by my son just playing around. 3D tiling / honeycomb patterns are really neat!
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