For our math project today we returned a tiling idea that is a really fun idea for kids to explore. Here are a few of our prior projects on the subject:
A fun counting exercise for kids suggested by Jim Propp
Today the plan was to look at 2xN tilings first and then move on to tilings of 3xN rectangles with 3×1 dominoes.
We stared by exploring some simple 2xN cases and looked for patterns:
In the first video we counted the number ways that we could tile 2×1, 2×2, 2×3, and 2×4 rectangles with dominoes. Now the boys noticed the connection with the Fibonacci numbers and we tried to find and explanation for why the Fibonacci numbers seemed to be showing up here. The nice thing is that the boys pretty much got the complete explanation all on their own.
Now we moved on to counting the tilings of a 3xN rectangle using 3×1 “dominoes” – what would be different? What would be the same?
One really interesting thing here is that my older son and younger son came up with different ideas for how to count the general arrangement.
So, in the last video my older son had a counting hypothesis that I couldn’t quite understand. In the beginning of this video I have him explain his process more carefully. The surprise was that for the 3×6 case we were looking at next both of their counting procedures predicted the same number of domino tilings.
In this part of the project we tried to follow both procedures to see how they worked.
Having sorted out the counting procedure in the last video, we now looked carefully at the 2xN and 3xN tiling procedures and saw that we could compute the number of tilings for the 2×100 and 3×100 cases if we wanted to.
I’d love to come up with more counting projects for kids. These projects are accessible to young kids and I think shows of some really fun ideas from advanced math that kids probably don’t usually see in school.
Mike's Math Page 