A fun project on the Arecibo Message inspired by a Holly Krieger Tweet

Saw this neat Tweet from Holly Krieger earlier today:

sharing the weirdest real-life use of factorization I know: the Arecibo message. Nice description here:https://t.co/EZRrOLn3lT

— Holly Krieger (@hollykrieger) January 8, 2017

After reading the post I was super excited to go through it with the boys when they got home from school.

So, we read the post after dinner and then made a code out of snap cubes. Here’s what the boys thought of the post:

and here’s our secret message!

We had a lot of fun with this project. It looks like something that could be pretty fun with a group, too, so I’m thinking about using it for 4th and 5th grade Family Math night at my younger son’s school next month.