Yesterday, thanks to a comment from Jacob Rus, my younger son and I took a fresh look at the Gosper curve:
Revisiting the Gosper Curve – part 2
That project (and today’s, too!) uses some ideas from this site:
The Gosper curve on fractalcurves.com
A few of our prior Gosper curve projects are:
A fun fractal project – exploring the Gosper curve
Today my older son was back from his trip and three of us built a level 3 Gosper curve from our Zometool set.
Because my older son missed yesterday’s project we started by looking at the Gosper curve on the website linked above:
After the quick introduction we moved to the living room to try to build the curve. In preparation for today’s project we’d built 7 level 2 curves last night. It turned out, though, that we’d made a small mistake in the last movie so in order to build the curve correctly we had to take a short (and not filmed) pause to go back and look at the picture on the computer again.
Finally, we built the complete level 3 curve together (without filming – it probably took 20 minutes). Here’s what the boys had to say about the completed shape and what they learned builiding it. I hope the video quality is good enough to be able to see the yellow Zome struts that we used to mark the points where the level 2 curves connected to each other. My younger son refers to those connections a few times.
Mike's Math Page 