An intro knot activity for kids

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and playing with our various 3d printed knots lately. It feels like there are lots of great projects for kids here, but I’m struggling a little to find them.

Last night I tried something pretty simple – take several different versions of the trefoil knot and have the kids try to recreate those versions with a knotted rope.

Here are the shows and some initial thoughts about them from the boys. These knots were designed by Henry Segerman and Laura Taalman:

Next we started trying to make the shapes – first the “easy” ones 🙂

Next we moved on to some more difficult shapes – in particular the 2nd one gave the boys quite a bit of difficulty. Making the connection between these two versions of the trefoil knot isn’t completely straightforward:

I let the boys try to finish making the new knot shape with the camera off. It took a few more minutes. In this video they show how to go back and forth between the two versions:

So, definitely a fun project, but a little more difficult than I expected. We’ll see how difficult playing with the knot with 4 crossings is tomorrow.