Activity Description Step through the generation of the Koch Snowflake -- a fractal made from deforming the sides of a triangle, and explore number patterns in sequences and geometric properties of fractals.

Shodor Interactivate utilizes JavaScript technology, you must enable it to effectively use our site.

If you wish to leave JavaScript disabled, you may attempt to view the activity. Here is some additional information about this activity that may not be accessible without JavaScript.

Koch's Snowflake

Place in mathematics curriculum:

• practice students' fraction manipulation skills
• practice students' pattern finding skills
• practice students' area and perimeter skills
• demonstrate the complexity of infinity
• motivate the ideas of self-similarity and recursion
• demonstrate fractal objects
• motivate the idea of a limit

This activity allows the user to step through the process of building the Koch Snowflake. This activity would work well in groups of two to four for about thirty to thirty-five minutes if you use the exploration questions and five minutes otherwise.

Preparations for this activity:

• give implicit directions on what they are to do. For example, "Today we are going to record data in the table on the worksheet and see if we can find patterns in the numbers ..."
• answer the question "What does it mean by the n-th case?"
• discuss infinity, length, finding patterns in numbers, etc.