A little over 2.5 years ago I saw this very neat question from James Tanton:
The question led to a really fun – and also one of our first – 3d printing projects:
James Tanton’s geometry problem and 3d printing
We’ve now got a few more years of 3d printing under our belts and a new program we are using – F3 by Reza Ali – is opening completely new 3d printing ideas for us.
Somewhat incredibly, F3 has a one line command that draws all of the points that are a fixed distance away from a cube. Here’s that beautiful shape:
Seeing that command inspired me to revisit James Tanton’s old question. I wasn’t quite able to do it in one line (ha ha – my programming skills are measured in micro-Reza Alis . . . .), but I was still able to make the shape. Here’s how it looked on the screen:
After the boys got home from school we revisited the old project together and used both the old and the new 3d prints to help us describe the shape (sorry for the noise in the background – that’s a humidifier I forgot to turn off):
Maybe because it is one of our first projects ever(!), but I love this problem as an example of how 3d printing gives younger kids access to more complex problems.
Mike's Math Page 