Having built a polyhedron from a net or illustration, students will feel pleased with what they have done. But they can now capitalise on their success by finding the properties of their shape. Most important are the planes of mirror symmetry and axes of rotation symmetry. Then there is the matter of how many faces, edges and vertices they have. It is this second question which concerns us here.
Most Sudoku puzzles use the numbers 1 to 9, but you can use anything – letters, colours, shapes, …And you can make up puzzles with fewer items. We shall use just 4. If you think such puzzles are likely to be too simple, I warn you that we shall move from 'single' Sudoku to 'double' Sudoku and even 'triple double' Sudoku.
The 4 Colour Map Theorem says that you never need more than 4 colours to colour a map so that regions with the same colour don’t touch. You have to count the region round the edge because the theorem is really about a map drawn on a sphere. The theorem is shape-blind. It doesn’t matter what shape a region is. What matters are the regions it shares a border with.
I am the Teaching and Learning Adviser for Maths and Numeracy for Jersey in the Channel Islands. Having purchased some Polydron for delivering some class based reasoning activities, I started to wonder about the possibility of running an interschool competition where the rounds of the competition are hands on construction activities with Polydron.
Most children at school start learning about magnetism with the use of bar magnets, horseshoe magnets or magnetic marbles.
Archimedes famously discovered that the volumes of a cone, a hemisphere and a cylinder of the same height and diameter stand in the ratio 1 : 2 : 3.
The etymology of geometry comes from Ancient Greek from 2 words - "ge" which means "earth" and "metria" which means "measuring".
The ATM Easter Conference offers a host of different activities and experiences, but at the heart of them all is the opportunity to become immersed in mathematical problems, thoughts and explorations. These often arise from sessions or discussions at the conference itself, but last year I arrived with a problem already buzzing through my mind.
I bought my first pack of Polydron in 1990. It was from the Early Learning Centre, it was a cube with a number of triangles packed inside, a nice desk toy that demonstrated the possibilities of what can be created with a few squares and triangles.
The children click two Polydron pieces together. They now have a hinge. When they realise with excitement that they can join a third piece to the two and move into three dimensions, their world expands.