Playing with the Cubeoctahedron

Last night I was flipping through the book I bought to understand a bit more about folding – Geometric Folding Algorithms by Erik Demaine and Joseph O’Rourke:

and I ran across a short note on the cuboctahedron. The boys were taking a short trip today (school vacation week!) and I was looking for a short project to do before they left – folding up the cuboctahedron seemed perfect.

Making my life much easier was a template on Wolfram’s website:

Wolfram’s folding template for a cuboctahedron

Here’s what the boys had to say after creating the shape:

After the short discussion about the shape we went upstairs to look at the shape using the F3 program. My idea for the ~10 min discussion here was inspired by a talk by Keith Devlin I saw over the weekend:

Awesome talk by @profkeithdevlin at @AAASmeetings on the nature of math and how best teach the subject to our kids.https://t.co/tXpnzssuZl

— Edward Frenkel (@edfrenkel) February 19, 2017

I thought that an approach similar to a game with our F3 program would help the boys create the shape.

Here’s how we got started. The F3 program allows us to create a cube and an octahedron. It also allows you to add and subtract shapes. How can we use these 4 ideas to create the cuboctahderon?

I think the video here really shows what Devlin calls “mathematical thinking.” The conversation here was really fun (for me at least!) since trying to discuss the ideas through equations would be impossible. However, the geometric ideas are accessible to the boys via the F3 program, just as the number theory ideas are accessible to kids through Devlin’s “Wuzzit Trouble” program.

I broke the discussion into two pieces – at the start of the 2nd half of the discussion we are trying to figure out how to – essentially – flip the shape inside out. My son comes up with an idea that was very different than what I was expecting, and it worked 🙂