[sorry at the beginning that this post feels a little rushed. I wrote it during an archery class my son takes, but I forgot the power cord to my laptop and only had 20% battery at the start . . . . ]
Over the last week I saw two really neat videos from Annie Perkins on the Cairo pentagon tiling:
Yesterday I did a project with my older son on this shape of the pentagon. That project’s focus was on coordinate geometry:
Exploring Annie Perkins’s Cairo Pentagons with kids
Today I did a project with my younger son with 3d printed versions of the pentagons that I made today (after a few glorious fails . . . .). Sorry that the tiles don’t show up super well on camera when they are pushed together – I’d hoped that the white background with show through the gaps, but not so much 😦
Before starting I showed my son the two videos from Perkins and began the project by asking him to try to recreate the shapes he saw. He liked the tiling but ran into a little trouble trying to recreate it. It turns out that tiles also fit together in a way that doesn’t extend to a tiling of the plane. My son had a nice geometric explanation about why the shape he found wouldn’t extend to the full plane.
After running into a little difficulty in the last video, he started over with a new strategy. That new strategy involved putting the tiles together in groups of two and fitting those groups together. This method did lead to a tiling that he thought would extend to the full plane.
Definitely a fun project. You can see some links to other tiling projects we’ve done in yesterday’s project with my older son. Tiling is definitely a topic you can have a lot of fun with on a few different levels – from younger kids talking about the shapes they see, to older kids learning how to describe the equations of the boundary lines and coordinates of the points. Making the tiles is a fun 3d printing project, too.
Mike's Math Page 