What will it look like?

Tried out what I hoped would be a fun Zometool project this morning – what will it look like?

I first asked the kids to make some zome segments using a long blue strut in the middle and a medium blue strut on each end. Then I told them that we’d be making a cube and a dodecahedron out of these pieces.

After we made those shapes, we’d remove the medium pieces (and, as corrected by my older son, connecting up the shape after we removed those pieces!) – what do you think this new shapes will look like?

Here are their initial thoughts:

First up was the cube – here is the cube and their revised thoughts on what the new shape will look like after we removed the medium blue struts:

Here’s what our truncated cube looks like once the corners are removed and re-connected. It was interesting to hear them describe this shape – it was harder for them to describe that I was expecting.

Next up was the dodecahedron – here’s the shape with the medium-long-medium struts:

Finally, here’s the truncated dodecahedron. The surprise here is that the shape has regular faces – so it was an Archimedian solid. There is a truncated cube that is also an Archimedian solid, just not the one we made with our struts.

So, a fun little project working on a little bit of 3d visualization. I really wish I had something similar to the Zometool set when I was a kid!