Revisiting our Zometool Snowman

When we first moved into our house we did a couple of fun and large Zometool projects because we didn’t have any furniture 🙂

This week I saw a fun tweet from Eli Lubroff that reminded me of one of those projects:

https://twitter.com/eluberoff/status/801541820979167232

Here’s a part of that old project 🙂

Today we revisited that old snowman and had the boys talk about each of the Archimedean solids in the shape. This is a fun project – not just because the shapes themselves are cool – but you get a nice opportunity to talk about counting and symmetry. You’ll see in the videos that my older son is a bit more comfortable with the idea, but my younger son seems to catch on by the 3rd video.

Here’s a link to all of the Archimedean solids on Wikipedia:

The Archimedean Solid page on Wikipedia

And here’s our project:

First the bottom of the snowman – the Truncated Icosidodecahedron

Next was the Rhombicosidodecahedron

Next was the Icosidodecahedron

Finally the Archimedean Solid Snowman 🙂 Two years later and he still fits!

Definitely one of my all time favorites and a really fun way to discuss counting and symmetry!

Fun with rotopo

Saw this neat tweet from Jim Propp yesterday:

My kids are thoroughly engrossed in roTopo; I'm a happy math-dad. https://t.co/PAYejcDGm1

— James Propp (@JimPropp) November 25, 2016

After playing the game for a just a few minutes I knew that my kids would love it.

Here’s each of their reaction to seeing and playing the game.

My younger son first:

My older son next:

So, definitely a fun little game for kids. They need to be fairly fluent with the arrow keys on the keyboard, but that’s really all that’s required. Definitely some fun puzzles to solve!