Earlier in the week we studied the cuboctahedron:
That project is here:
Playing wiht the Cuboctahedron
Also earlier in the week I saw these shapes displayed in the MIT math department:
The chance encounters with these shapes this week gave me the idea to revisit them today and see if we could build them with our zometool set. The second shape, I think, is mislabled in the MIT display case – or maybe they are just using a less common name. The usual name is the icosidodecahedron, and it is also a shape we’ve seen before:
I started the project today by showing the shapes to the boys and asking what they knew about them:
Then we went to the living room to build the shapes. The only tricky part is that the cuboctahedron needs green struts. As always, the wonderful thing about the Zometool set is that you can go from seeing these shapes on a page to holding them in your hand almost immediately!
The last part of the project was building the dual shape of the cuboctahedron. I wasn’t sure if the zome set would let us do this since you can’t exactly find the center of the triangles with zome – but we did catch a lucky break! The dual is also a shape we’ve seen before 🙂
This project was really fun – exploring geometry with our Zometool set is one of my favorite activities!
Mike's Math Page 