Using Ernest Irving Freese’s “Geometric Transformations” with kids

A few weeks ago we got this book in the mail:

Came in the mail today @CutTheKnotMath pic.twitter.com/3ZWU5q2UaL

— Mike Lawler (@mikeandallie) April 13, 2018

We used the book for one fun project already:

Playing with geometric transformations

Today we were really short on time in the morning, but I still wanted to do a project before we ran out the door. I’d been hoping print some of the shapes from the book, so today for a quick project we looked at one of the transformations.

Here’s the introduction to the shape and some of the thoughts that the boys had:

Next we tried to understand some of the details about the shapes – could we understand anything about the lengths of the sides or the angles?

I think that we now have enough information to make the tiles. It was nice that a little bit of trig came up since that’s what my older son is studying right now. Not sure if I’ll have time this weekend or not, but we’ll hopefully be able to do a project with the 3d printed tiles in the next week.