Got a great surprise in the mail yesterday!
I decided to introduce Dan’s shapes to the boys by putting them on our whiteboard and seeing what the boys would do.
My younger son went first and chose to slightly surprising shape to try to make out of the Gosper Island pieces:
Next he wanted to see if he could make a larger rectangle using the big pieces that Dan sent us. It would not have occurred to me to try to make a rectangle out of these pieces – it is fun to see the ideas that kids have!
Now I had my older son look at the pieces. He started building and made some holes. He had a little trouble seeing that the holes were the same shape as the other Gosper island pieces – he saw that they were hexagon-like, but they were so small that seeing that they had the same shape as our pieces was difficult.
At the end of the last movie my son wondered if you could make the same kind of holes using starting with the big pieces. He ended up building a slightly different shape than the one in the previous video, but the holes in this shape were indeed exactly the size of the small Gosper island pieces:
So a fun project just playing around with the pieces. It is pretty amazing to me how well the three pieces all fit together – these laser cuttings are a great way to explore fractals and fractal dimension.
Mike's Math Page 