This is part of Wordless Wednesday…
Category: Patterns
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Painting Math
Part of Wordless Wednesday…
My sister’s birthday brunch was at Painting with a Twist this weekend. Here’s the original:
And here’s and my math interpretation of it:
Share your thoughts in the comments or on twitter/x.
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Beautiful Math
I get sent all sorts of things that claim to show the beauty of numbers. For the most part they show various number theory concepts that make a math mom think, “I wonder why that works.”
This, however, is truly beautiful.
Enjoy it yourself. Show it to your kids. And understand a little more about the theory behind Nature by Numbers here.
Share your thoughts in the comments or on twitter/x.
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Improve Math Learning With Rubik’s Cube Art!
I stumbled upon the Paul Smith Gallery in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago and was completely drawn by the Rubikcubism art by Invader on the wall.
It was a pixelated image that looked interesting from afar, but when you got close, there was a whole new surprise. It was made from 225 Rubik’s Cubes!
I spent a good 30 minutes in the shop talking to David, the Paul Smith associate. So many questions came up, including:
- How can you make an image with only six colors? (Rubik’s cube has six sides, thus only six colors.)
- The price tag on the artwork was $22,000, how much money was spent in actual Rubik’s cubes?
- Could I do something like this?
- If I were to replicate it, could you tell the difference between the original and the fake?
- What kind of math is involved in creating something like this?
Can your kids do it?
It might be fun. It could get expensive, though: at $10 a pop, and after sales tax, 225 Rubik’s Cubes come to about $2500.
I don’t have this kind of money to drop on cubes, and I’m guessing that most homeschoolers don’t either. But for only $10 and the technology you already have around the house, you can let your child be a Rubikcubist!
They sure can!
If your children are inclined to give this a shot, buy them each a Rubik’s cube. Let them explore the number of sides, and the number of “pixels” on each side. If they don’t already know about how colors work together, they can either research or learn through experimentation.
They can choose to use graph paper & colored pencils, Microsoft Excel, or a paintbrush program to map out what they want their image to look like.
As they twist the Rubik’s Cube into each pattern, take a photo of it, or a color scan. Print it at full size and let them use the prints to create the final artwork.
Making Rubikcubist artwork is math!
Throughout the projects, explore the concepts of area and patterns. Also encourage them to think about color theory (of which I know squat, but your kids will be learning as they experiment).
Questions to ask:
- How many total “pixels” did you use?
- How many total Rubik’s Cubes did you use?
- If you were to make this “for real,” how much would it cost us in Rubik’s Cubes?
- What else did you notice about the project regarding colors, patterns and area?
Solving a Rubik’s Cube is math, too.
By the way, the solution to a Rubik’s cube is mathematical. It’s actually part of mathematics called group theory. My office mate in grad school was able to solve a Rubik’s cube in about 20 minutes.
I was never able to figure it out.
Share your art!
Put your child’s final artwork on Flickr.com or other photo service and post a link to it in the comments.
Feature image is by Robin Iversen Rönnlund on Flickr.com, CC BY.
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Finding Patterns in a Lokta Paper Blank Book
Written as part of the Count 10, Read 10 series.
For my 40th birthday, I bought myself this beautiful Lokta paper book from a fabulous little store in the Houston Heights called Write Now!
It has circles on it – one of my “things.” I love circles. But then I saw how the colors were laid out.
“Holy cow! This is a teaching opportunity!” I thought.
And it got even better at the Texas Home School Coalition’s convention this last week. I shared it with former math teacher and now-homeschooler Sharon Brantley and she saw even more goodies in it!
You can use it to teach math!
Anything that has more than one aspect/characteristic/color (pretty much everything) can be checked for patterns. Patterns are an essential, perhaps even the most important, building block for mathematical thinking and development.
Here’s what you can see in this book cover:
Connect the green dots and you get a square. (Also the yellow dots.) 
The pink dots form a line and then the one dot off to the side can make a perpendicular line to the other line. (Purple dots, too.) 
These blue dots make a funny little shape. But wait! There’s more!
What Sharon pointed out to me was that you can draw an L from any dot to another dot of the same color!
Optional: This “L” thing links directly to the slope, by the way. Between any two points of the same color, the slope is either 1/2 or -2. Cool, huh?
Where do you see patterns in your world? Share it (and a link to the picture) in the comments!
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Teaching Patterns with Playful Bath Shapes
Do you get “why” questions often from kids?
Differentiation is the foundation of learning. Curiosity comes in the form of “Why is that different?” And right behind it is “Why is that the same?”
So patterns – and the lack of patterns – are essential in the development of a child.
The picture below is a collection of Discovery Toys (not all of them because they live in a house with a 19mo child).
While in the tub, I encourage Daughter to see which ones are the same color. You can label the bathtub tiles with soap crayons so you can discuss the patterns more easily. Use the Cartesian Coordinate plane or Excel cell names like I did in Photoshop.
Here are some things to talk about to encourage pattern discovery and learning. Or click here to download this as a printable MSWord Document.
- Which shapes are similar? Which are congruent?
- Which shapes are kind of the same (similar, but not in the official math sense of “similar”)
- Put shapes together that “go together” – these could be same shape, color, “feel” (like B6 and B7 are both angled).
- Compare shape A5 to the shapes A3, A4, A6, A7 and A8.
- What do cells B3 and B8 have in common?
- How are C3 and C4 different?
- What’s in common in cells A2 and B2?
- How are shapes C1 and C2 different?
- How are C2 and B3 similar?
And then look at the world!
When you’re out of the tub, make sure to encourage observations – of everything. For something like the gate trim in the picture you can ask questions like:
- What is similar?
- What pieces are different?
- Do you see spots that are kind of the same but mirror imaged?
- If you were to make this symmetric, what other parts would you have to add to it?
Have fun. See patterns. Enjoy the discovery!
