This is another post in my series of posts on math in the real world.
My wife, son, and I went to a kids science event at SFU today, and at one table they had some marshmallow diagrams set up to demonstrate molecules. They let the kids play with the marshmallows and toothpicks, so my son made a giraffe. When we got home, he helped himself to some marshmallows and toothpicks and continued to make things with them.
My son noticed that the most stable form included triangles (with some help from mommy), so he started to construct everything with triangles. When he moved into three dimensions, he noticed that the tetrahedron was the most stable of the forms he could build and so his construction soon began to look very mathematical in shape.
Now in his most complex form, he has started to build a three dimension tesselation. If he hadn't been called away to dinner, or if we hadn't been running low on toothpicks, I'm sure he would have continued the pattern.
This activity involves both 2d and 3d geometry, tesselations, sequences and other patterns. Can you think of other mathematics that can be found in this activity?
David is a mathematics teacher and a learning specialist for technology at Stratford Hall in Vancouver, BC. He has been teaching since 2002, and has worked in Brooklyn, London, and Bangkok before moving back to Canada. He has his Masters degree in Educational Technology from UBC, and is the co-author of a mathematics textbook. He has been published in ISTE's Leading and Learning, Educational Technology Solutions, The Software Developers Journal, The Bangkok Post and Edutopia. He blogs with the Cooperative Catalyst, and is the Assessment group facilitator for Edutopia. He has also helped organize the first Edcamp in Canada, and TEDxKIDS@BC.