Lately I have been spending an inordinate amount of time with the Tiling Table. Many a roam mid have turned into “sit-and-make-a-pretty-pattern” and are over before I know it. It’s funny, because although I’m in my third year of working at the Explo, I’ve spent very little time with this exhibit up until now. Pattern blocks used to be one of my favorite activities in elementary school, so why has it taken me so long to rekindle my love for these little blocks?
When I was younger, I would always start with the same pattern: yellow hexagon in the middle with six red trapezoids to make a flower, with green triangles for a stem and leaves. And don’t get me started on how frustrating it was to my six year old brain why those two of those darn green triangles wouldn’t make a square (if only I had known about right angles back then!). Now, I’m super interested in making patterns that tesselate, especially ones that use the diamonds. I like to imagine what a whole floor of these patterns would look like as I create them.
Here are a couple of my recent creations:
It started like this…
And 30 minutes later…
Honestly, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.
This one was an accidental optical illusion. My original goal was to make a tessellating shape that had a square as the starting place and included diamonds.
Anybody else addicted to a particular exhibit right now?
Pattern Blocks has always been one of my favorite exhibits. One of the most interesting thing to me is how differently certain people approach it. I cannot recall ever making anything pictorial or asymmetrical, even as a child in preschool, but I have a set at home, and when I play with them with other adults they commonly produce creations with no symmetry. I remember the first time I saw this, it completely blew my mind. It literally had not occurred to me that you could do that. My playmate was similarly shocked at my highly ordered mandala. It had not occurred to him that you could make a repeating pattern. This has led me to try to stretch the boundaries of pattern blocks to include patterns with holes, multiple layers, no touching pieces, etc. I also really like to play a game where you make a shape, a regular dodecagon, for example, and see how many different ways you can fill it with blocks.
nice patterns lianna!
check out this time lapse of the tiling table that nicole and luigi took a couple of months ago.
http://vimeo.com/16331692
i like how ideas go across the three sections of the board and it’s crazy to see how fast intricate patterns get built and destroyed.
I think we should do some more experiments…
http://mathtoybox.com/patblocks3/patblocks3.html is good for recreating it on line – not as nice to manipulate, but they click together nicely!