A bonus project on a Zometool icosahedron

We’ve done two projects on platonic solids recently:

Talking about Angles in Platonic Solids

Following up on our angles in platonic solids project

In the last project my younger son explored two different kinds of “golden rectangles” inside of the icosahedron. I thought it would be fun to try to fill in the entire shape with the rectangles, so today the boys took on that challenge.

Here’s their discussion of the shape made by filling in all of the large golden rectangles in the icosahedron:

Next we turned to the shape made by filling in the smaller golden rectangles. These were a little harder to make. Since the first shape took a bit longer to make than we expected, we only filled in 10 of these rectangles and avoided the problem of dealing with ones that overlapped.

To wrap up we removed the struts from the original icosahedron to get a better view of the shape formed by the rectangles:

Definitely a fun project. As always, it is incredible how easy (and fun!) it is to explore 3d shapes with a Zometool set.