Playing with some Archimedean solids

Today’s project was inspired by two books:

and

I leave for a week-long trip to Scotland tonight and was looking for a project that would be both fun and relatively easy to do. By luck I piced up Dave Richeson’s book and it fell open to a picture of some ARchimedean solids which gave me the idea for the Zome project.

We have done some projects on these shapes previously via Zome Geometry. Here’s the full collection:

Our projects mentioning Archimedean solids

This shape was particularly fun:

Today we started the project by looking at the Wikipedia page for Archimedean solids:

Next we went to talk about the shapes we built – starting with the truncated dodecahedron. It was fun to talk about the symmetries and also count the number of faces, vertices and edges.

Sorry this (and the next) video is so out of focus – I chanced the focus to film the computer screen for the last video and forgot to change it back.

Now we moved on to the truncated icosahedron:

The last Archimedean solid we looked at was the Rhombicuboctahedron:

Finally we looked at an example from Richeson’s book of a solid that is not an Archimedean solid, but still has most of the properties -> called it a smushed icosahedron:

This project shows how a Zometool set can make some advanced ideas in math accessible to kids. If there was one