Young Escher

I wanted some sort of smart title like Young Einstein, but that was taken. And this Instructable is less about physics and more about math.

This is a great way to introduce young kids to geometry without them knowing about it. Lots of kids get stuffed baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls. They all have interesting shapes and designs. The soccer ball is recognized as a truncated icosahedron, but no one is selling the other great polyhedron, like octahedrons, pentagonal hexecohedrons, and rhombic dodecahedrons.

Here we'll make a pattern for our polyhedron and then sew it together with scrap material.

(Pictured is the finished rhombic dodecahedron.)

Step 1 Get Polyhedron Net

The polyhedron net is a spread out 2D version of the 3D polyhedron. It is like the un-folded version of the polyhedron.

The best source of polyhedron nets that I've found is from Wolfram MathWorld.

(If the link doesn't work follow from www.mathworld.wolfram.com through Recreational Mathematics --> Mathematical Art --> Polyhedron Nets.)

Select the "Build your own polyhedron" button.
Print two (2) copies
-one at normal scale
-one at larger scale for pattern
(The larger the pattern, the easier it will be to sew together. I upscaled my printout to 300%.)

Most of the polyhedron use regular polygons in the nets. The attached PDF file has a set of polygons that you can use for your templates.

Comments

[mikesty]

Awesome! Young Einstein is also a cool movie :)

[rachel]

Oh yeah, geometry through sewing! I love it!