After school yesterday I had each of the boys make a pattern with the nonagon tiles and then build the two patterns that were in the book. The videos below show there work. My younger son went first:
Here’s what my older son had to say:
This project was super fun from start to finish. Hearing the thoughts from the boys after seeing the pattern initially was really fun. Building and printing the blocks was a nice geometry / trig lesson. Then having the boys play around with them made for a really satisfying end to the project. I hope to do more like this in the near future.
Last night my son and I talked about how you could make these tiles, with a focus on the trig and algebra required to define the shapes.
Here’s the introduction to the topic:
Now we talked about how to define the kite shape in the tiling. This involves talking about 40 and 50 degree angles:
Finally, we talked through the last part – finding the final point is pretty challenging. Turns out, though, that we don’t have to find the coordinates of the point because we can write down the equation of the top line pretty easily:
I’ve been happily surprised that 3d printing is a fun way to help kids explore 2d geometry. I’m excited to have my son try to make some other tiles from the book on his own for our next project.
[This is a redo of a blog post from January 2018 that somehow ended up 1/2 deleted. Not sure what I did to that old post, but I didn’t want to lose the ideas.]
In January 2018 I attended a terrific public lecture given by Heather Macbeth at MIT. The general topic was differential geometry, and the specific topic she discussed was “developable surfaces.”
Here’s an example from the talk:
Earlier today I attended an absolutely fantastic public lecture given by Heather Macbeth of MIT. The topic was "developable surfaces" -> surfaces that can be made from a sheet of paper. Can't wait to share this topic with kids: https://t.co/SjSbGfWxrq#math#mathchat
I also printed a few examples and shared them with the boys the next day:
Here’s what my older son had to say about the shapes:
Here’s what my younger son thought:
These are really neat surfaces to explore. If you look at some of the mathematical ideas for “Developable surfaces” you’ll find that some of the surfaces are actually pretty easy to code, print, and share with kids!
[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:
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.
I thought it would be a fun idea to add to the list of our growing list of pentagon projects. At this point I’ve lost track of all of them, but they got started with this amazing tweet from Laura Taalman:
After seeing Perkins’s tweet I started down the path of making the Cairo tiling pentagons but super unluckily had a typo in my printing code. At least my cat made good use of the not-quite-Cairo pentagons:
So, while I wait for the correct pentagons to print, I thought I’d talk about the special shape of the Cairo tiles with my older son. One of the neat things about all of these pentagon projects is getting to talk about geometry with kids in sort of non-standard, non-textbook way. Tonight’s conversation was about coordinate geometry using the properties of the Cairo pentagon.
Here’s a pic from the Wikipedia page on the Cairo tiles:
To start the project I drew the shape on our board and asked my son to find the coordinates of the points. This is a bit of an open ended question because you have to know the lengths of the side so know the coordinates – I was happy that he noticed that problem (and, just to be 100% clear, I don’t know for sure if there are restrictions on the sides for the Cairo tiling – I’ll learn that when the new pentagons finish printing – ha ha).
Here’s how he started in on the problem:
For the second part of the project he had to make one more choice for a side length, and then he was able to find the coordinates of all of the corners of the pentagon.
One of the great (and happy) surprises with math and 3d printing is that you get neat opportunities to explore 2d geometry. Some of our old projects exploring 2d geometry with 3d printing are here:
Over the winter break I began to think about collecting some of our 3d printing projects into to one post to highlight various different ways that 3d printing can be used to help kids explore math.
The post got a little long, but if you are interesting in thinking about 3d printing and math, hopefully there are ideas in here that either catch your eye.
(1) Archimedes’s proof relating the volume of a sphere, a cone, and a cylinder
I asked my younger son to pick his favorite 3d printing exercise – here’s what he picked:
My older son’s favorite project involved the rhmobic dodecahedron:
We’ve actually done a bunch of projects – both 3d printing and Zometool projects – with the rhombic dodecahedron. Here’s a link to all (or probably most) of them:
This is probably my favorite 3d printing project that we’ve done on our own. I didn’t do a specific project with the boys using the shape because it is really fragile (in fact, I have 3 other broken ones . . . ).
The problem is -> can you cut a hole in a cube large enough so that you can pass another cube of the same size through the first cube?
An old project where we talk about the problem (without 3d printing) is here:
The boys had really enjoyed trying to solve Iwahiro’s puzzle (which may be more difficult to get apart than it is to put together!).
(6) The Gyroid and other minimal surfaces
3d printing allows you to explore some incredible shapes. For instance:
Rice University scientists have successfully 3D printed Hermann Schwarz' Schwarzites: theorized minimum surfaces having negative Gaussian curvature. https://t.co/hEpVK0GH7M@RiceUniversity@RiceUNews
Another calculus-related project is here, and it includes a great video from Brooklyn Tech that helped show me the possibilities 3d printing had for helping kids explore math:
Here’s a really fun shape to play with – the rattleback. It wants to rotate one way, but not the other way. There’s very little indication when you look at it that it would have such an odd property:
(10) James Tanton’s tetrahedron problem
This one has a special place in my heart because it was one of the first times we used 3d printing to solve a “new to us” problem. I loved how these shapes came together. The problem involved understanding the locus of points that were 1 unit away from a tetrahedron:
We’ve done a bunch of projects related to the 4th dimension that have been aided by 3d printing. Most of this work has been inspired in one way or another by Henry Segerman. Here are a few examples:
Another one of my all time favorites projects came from Laura Taalman. Right after the discovery of a 15th type of pentagon that tiles the plane, Taalman created 3d print models of all 15 of the pentagons so that anyone could explore this new discovery:
This is one of the most amazing illusions that you’ll ever see 🙂
Thanks to @landisb for suggesting I 3D print my impossible cylinder. And thank you to her for printing my file. I will have to try others. pic.twitter.com/X9Drl3Il4w
Saw a neat tweet earlier today about 3d printing, math, and engineering:
Rice University scientists have successfully 3D printed Hermann Schwarz' Schwarzites: theorized minimum surfaces having negative Gaussian curvature. https://t.co/hEpVK0GH7M@RiceUniversity@RiceUNews
The grey shape displayed in the article is a “made thicker for 3d printing” version of the surface I thought it would be fun to print that shape today and use it for a little project with the kids tonight. Here’s the Mathematica code and what the print looks like in the Preform software:
Generating an approximation to the shape isn't that difficult (and might be a fun intro 3d printing exercise for a Trig class). Cleaning up the final prints and getting rid of the supports is going to be a bit of a headache, though. pic.twitter.com/YSTRs3wx5Y
8 hours later the print finished and I asked the boys to describe that shape plus the gyroid. It is always fascinating to hear what kids see in unusual shapes. My younger son went first:
Here’s what my older son had to say (and he’s starting to study trig, so we could go a tiny bit deeper into the math behind the shape I printed today):
Next we watched the video about the shapes made by Rice University:
After watching the video I asked the boys to talk about some of the things they learned:
Of course, mostly they didn’t want to talk about the shapes – they wanted to stand on them! So much for an 8 hour print and 45 min of trying to clean out the supports . . .
Here’s how the standing went:
Definitely a fun project and a fun way to show kids a current application of both theoretical math and 3d printing!
Today I decided to revisit that project. We started by looking at the same idea from algebra:
Does ?
At first we talked about the two equations using ideas from algebra and arithmetic.
/
Now I asked the boys for their geometric intuition and then showed them the 3d printed graphs of the two functions.
This part ran a little long while my younger son was stuck on a small but important point about the graph – I didn’t want to tell him the answer and it took a couple of minutes for him to work through the idea in his mind.
/
Next I showed them 3d prints of and and asked them to tell me which one was which. It is really neat to hear the reasoning that kids use to go from shapes to equations.
/
For the last part of the project I asked the boys to come up with their own algebra “mistakes” for us to explore. My older son chose to compare the graphs of and .
/
My younger son chose the two equations and . Changing the + to a – in our first set of equations turns out to have some pretty interesting geometric consequences – “it looks sort of like a saddle” was a fun comment.
One especially interesting idea here was exploring where . We used Mathematica’s ContourPlot[] function to explore those two lines because those lines weren’t immediately obvious on the saddle.
/
I’m happy to have had the opportunity to revisit this old project. I think exploring simple algebraic expressions is a fun and sort of unexpected application of 3d printing.
My older son has just started the trigonometry this week. I know the topic can be a little dry at the beginning, so I wanted to show him more than just unit circle exercises.
Today we looked at a few fun curves that you can make just by playing around with trig functions.
I stared by showing some simple graphs and then we moved to some 3d shapes:
Next we took a cue from an old project inspired by Henry Segerman:
Hopefully both the shape and the shadows come through in the filming – I haven’t figured out how to shoot shadows very well yet.
Finally I let the kids play around with the Mathematica code for a bit to create their own shapes. They had a couple of pretty fun ideas.
There was one little issue that came up on my younger son’s plot, unfortunately. I didn’t have enough detail in the plot to multiply the range by 10. That’s why his picture fuzzed out quite a bit. I didn’t see the problem on the fly, though, and wasn’t able to fix it in real time.
I’m excited to help my son learn about trig. Hopefully a few projects like this one will help him see that that there’s more to trig than just triangles!
was not the same as 
metrics:
I thought it would be fun to print that shape today and use it for a little project with the kids tonight. Here’s the Mathematica code and what the print looks like in the Preform software:
?
– I didn’t want to tell him the answer and it took a couple of minutes for him to work through the idea in his mind.
and 
and asked them to tell me which one was which. It is really neat to hear the reasoning that kids use to go from shapes to equations.
and 
.
and 
. Changing the + to a – in our first set of equations turns out to have some pretty interesting geometric consequences – “it looks sort of like a saddle” was a fun comment.
. We used Mathematica’s ContourPlot[] function to explore those two lines because those lines weren’t immediately obvious on the saddle.
Mike's Math Page 