Entry #8: Geometric aspects with Pattern Shapes ⬜⬛

Geometric aspects with Pattern Shapes

During my last entry, I showed you a digital geoboard that was quite useful to study geometry. Nevertheless, when I started to research the different resources that The Math Learning Center had developed, I found another one which can be quite useful in order to teach different geometric aspects 🔎. This resource is named Pattern Shapes (click here!). At a very first moment, it seems to be a quite simple tool, but if we go into details, we will see that it is quite complete and has many possibilities. For that reason, I want to share with you some of those educational uses in order to work with our students! 👧👦

However, as a brief introduction, it is convenient to say that, basically, this resource consists of a board in which we can place different geometric figures to move, join or rotate them, among other aspects. This means that the limits are set by the teachers, who must make the most of this tool. What uses have I come up with? Let's see them! 👀

Learning some geometric shapes

Obviously, the basic educational use would be focused on learning the geometric shapes that appear in the resource. As it can be seen on the left, there are figures such as triangles, a hexagon, an isosceles trapezoid, parallelograms... 

Angles and introduction of rotation

A really interesting feature of this resource is that it allows us to measure different angles with a specific tool. So, students could see that the three angles of an equilateral triangle measure 60 degrees or that the four angles of a square are right angles (they measure 90 degrees). 

Therefore, we could introduce one of the Euclidean transformations, the rotation. But be careful 😲, this resource does not allow us to carry out a precise rotation, so that is why I have said that it could be useful in order to introduce a notion of it. As you can see, the angle tool can be useful for doing this, so it could be good to show this before teaching students how a rotation must be performed in an appropriate way (with a compass, a protractor...). I must insist, you should only use it as an approximation of the concept, because if the students understand that this is how it is done, they will not perform the rotations with the right process.

Tessellations

Therefore, this tool is also useful to make regular tessellations and semi-regular tessellations 😯. First of all, a tessellation is a repeating pattern of shapes that fills the entire plane without gaps and overlaps. It is convenient to remember that the first ones are those created by using just a regular polygon, which must be an equilateral triangle, a square or a hexagon, whereas the semi-regular tessellations are those that use two or more regular polygons which are always joined following the same pattern in the vertexes. This means that each union of shapes must follow the same pattern.

We could challenge students to discover the different types of tessellations that can be created through this resource! 👧👦 This activity would be aimed at older students, but the results can be quite surprising. 

Filling outlines

Another interesting tool that this resource has is that one which asks us to fill an outline. We could ask our students to do this and write the different shapes that they have used in order to finish the exercise. From my point of view, this activity is quite nice in order to develop spatial perception skills, among others.

Finally, here you can watch a few videos. In one of them, it is possible to see how series of shapes can be created, and in the other one we have some extra ideas to follow with this resource. That's all for now! See you! 👏