More Tessellations

In class we talk about Islamic tessellation art, going from this Google doc with images and resources. (The student's Google doc is editable, and they add their work to it. The full class one is 30 pages now of previous classes work!) Then the students get free time with pattern blocks, grid paper and some online applets.

Some of my students' work. With a few of my attempts at think further questions...

 Erin blogged about this, too.

 Anthony made this on triangular grid paper. I think I wished he differentiated the cubes a bit - but it's his vision!

 Very interesting tessellation from Becca. She made this cool piece and then saw what she could make from it. In our Facebook group I asked "So the fundamental domain is the smallest piece that repeats to fill the page. What might that be here?"
























Marty made these two. The hexagonal symmetry is a powerful pull with pattern blocks.

 Is Heather's hexagonal? On FB I asked: "Hmmm... so what's the ratio of red to blue if you go on to fill the whole plane?"

I thought there were interesting connections between Brianna's pattern blocks and Nick's triangular grid design.

On FB I asked about Brianna's: "Another good one for the fundamental domain question: what's the smallest set of blocks that you could repeat to make the whole pattern? I think this one would include parts of blocks!"





One more from in class: Andrew made overlapping triangles and was seeing what would happen.

Some work shared on the tessellation page:

Some Math Toybox creations from Hannah.

Jordan's triangular grid creation and Kourtney's square grid.

A few more rolling in:

Tabatha's online tessellation - nice detail work around the red vertices.

Nick's (the other one) square grid. He notes "I did try to get alot going in this. all of the negative space (not colored in) creates triangles. each center piece, negative space square behind center pieces, the Octagonal shapes around the negative squares, all rotate from left to right, clockwise. all of the corner pieces reflect from column to column horizontally and vertically. Embarrassing enough it took me a long to make this work. The initial "pattern" i thought of like a stamping, which would be the top and bottom row. then I worked inwards."

And we'll finish with Andrew's finished work. I like the Archimedean polygonal spiral... might have to make something like that.