Our d120s arrived!!
Here’s the unboxing:
We were pretty lucky to have gotten our order in before all of the publicity caused the number of orders to explode. Before the boys ran off to show their friends the new dice, we did a few projects. I asked the boys to think of a question that they thought would be interesting to study with the dice. They didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, but I just wanted their gut reactions anyway.
My older son thought it would be fun to see how far they rolled. We have several different types of dice around the house, plus a few 3d printed shapes, so we saw how far the different shapes rolled:
The “winner” wasn’t actually one of the d120s, but rather a pentagonal hexecontahedron that we’d printed from Laura Taalman’s blog:
Day 194 of Laura Taalman’s Makerhome blog – the Pentagonal Hexecontahedron
The Dice Lab actually makes a d60 in the shape of a deltoidal hexecontahedron, so – no surprise, really – they are way ahead of us!
My younger son wanted to use them to make binary codes. I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but we eventually decided that the odd numbers would represent a 1 and the even numbers would represent a 0. We rolled the dice to create some 5-digit binary numbers. Strangely, we rolled lots of even numbers:
Finally, we did a project that my wife suggested – how many rolls to you think it will take until we see a number that we’ve already rolled? Fun! We had a great time exploring this question.
So, some fun little projects with the dice. Now the boys are off showing their friends and using them for some advantage playing Magic: The Gathering 🙂
Oh, and just in case you’ve not seen the video about these new dice, here it is:
Mike's Math Page 