Paper Work

Tom had some interesting math homework tonight. He had to make a kite. They’re all going to fly kites in math class tomorrow. I don’t know what flying kites has to do with Trig, but it was a fun project.

He made an old fashioned diamond kite. He ripped some pine for the ribs.

And then added string around the perimeter and pasted a piece of paper over it. Then he made a tail out of string and strips of cellophane. Next he got out the airbrush to paint it.

Here’s what the the finished product looks like:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? I hope it flies well. We didn’t get much time for test flights.

Since we had all of this left over paper, we decided to honor Martin Gardner’s passing by making a hexaflexagon.

Here’s Peter laying out the lines.

And here’s Tom doing the tricky folding steps.

And here they are with the finished six sided, four dimensional flexagon.

They had never seen one before and were pretty surprised by the way it cycles through the different sides.

I loved Martin’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American when I was younger, so it was nice to share a bit with the kids. We also found this nice video about him.