*The Koch Snowflake with Squares

I asked the boys what they wanted to talk about today and got a fun response – the Koch Snowflake with squares!

Luckily we still had the Zome set out from the “tribones” project from last week – so making the first couple of iterations wasn’t that hard.

Before we started, though, I asked the boys what they thought the shape would look like:

While they were building I searched for something on line that would let us play with this particular fractal. I found these two Wolfram Demonstration projects:

Creat Alternative Koch Snowflakes by Tammo Jan Dijkema

and

Square Koch Fractal Curves by Robert Dickau

We’ll explore these to demonstrations below.

Here’s what the boys had to say about the first three iterations of the square Koch Snowflake. A fun thing that happened here was that during the discussion the boys found a small mistake in the construction of their level 3 curve:

Next we moved to the computer to explore the Wolfram Demonstration projects. First up was Robert Dickau’s “Square Koch Fractal Curves.” Sorry that this video (and probably the next one, too) is so fuzzy – it looked ok in the view finder. Oh well.

Finally, we explored Tammo Jan Dijkema’s “Create Alternative Koch Snowflakes” demonstration project. This project allows you to alter the fractal. The boys had a lot of fun playing with this project. Again, sorry for the fuzz in the video.