I don’t know why, but this zometool shape we made a few years ago based on Bathsheba Grossman’s Hypercube B migrated back down to the living room this week:
Seeing how that zome creation seems to change as you walk by it once again this week made me want to do a project revisiting 4d shapes with the boys.
We started by looking at a few shapes that we’ve played with before:
Next we looked carefully at Hypercube B by Bathsheba Grossman:
Now I had the boys watch the video about the Zometool version of Hypercube B and react to it:
Next we went to the Wikipedia page for the hypercube and look at some of the 2d representations. The boys reacted to some of the pictures and I asked them to pick one and draw it.
Here are their drawings and explanations. One fun surprise is that after they finished their drawings they noticed that they chose the same shape!
This was a fun project and not meant to dive into great detail. I’m happy that the boys are getting comfortable thinking about higher dimensions – it has been really fun to explore ideas from higher dimensional geometry with them.
Mike's Math Page 