Saw an amazing tweet from Matt Zucker yesterday:
My older son is on a school trip this weekend, so this project is just with my younger son (in 6th grade). I thought he’d had a lot of fun playing around with the program, so I let him explore it (with no instruction or even explanation) for about 10 min and then asked him what he thought was neat:
At the end of the last video he was playing around with the different numbers. I didn’t want to go into what those numbers represented, but I did think it would be great to hear some of his ideas and conjectures.
He found some ideas that seemed to work and a few that didn’t – so that was great to hear. By the end we’d found a shape that we could make from our Zometool set.
To finish this morning’s project we built the shape – here’s are his thoughts about having the shape in front of him vs seeing it on a computer screen:
This was a super fun project. I think it might be a nice challenge to try to dive a little deeper into the general Wythoff constructions that the Matt Zucker’s program is designed to explore. For now though, even with any details, the program is really fantastic for kids to play with.
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