One more look at the hypercube

We’ve done two projects on hypercubes after seeing Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s latest video. Those two projects are here:

Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s hypercube video is incredible!

Revisiting Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s hypercube video

The video that inspired those two projects is here:

After posting the second project our friend Roy Wiggins shared a video that he made several years ago:

After seeing Wiggins’s video I thought it would be fun to use in one more project with the boys. While they were at school today I printed the set of shapes corresponding to the intersection of the hypercube and 3d hyperplanes that you can see in both videos above. When the boys got home I talked about the shapes with them individually. In addition to the 3d prints, I had some zometool shapes set up to help understand the more traditional way to view and understand a hypercube.

Here’s how the talk went with my younger son:

And here’s what older son and I talked about:

This was definitely a fun series of projects. It was interesting to me that both kids really struggled to see how to explain the shape of a hypercube from these 3d shapes. Not that I was expecting it to be easy (!) but this alternate view of the hypercube proved to be much more difficult to process than I expected.