Today in the Math Explorations workshop, students learned about tessellations and fractals. Tessellations are a collection of plane figures that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps. The class used an Interactivate application called Tessellate! to create their own tessellations. Through this program, they learned that the corresponding vertices of the adjacent figures form the original polygon they modified. Next they viewed some artwork by M. C. Escher that incorporated tessellations.
After break, the students learned about fractal, which refers to a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole. They learned about different types of fractals such as Koch's Snowflake, Sierpinski's Triangle and the Hilbert Curve. Afterwards, they created their own 3-D fractals with tetrahedrons. Through this activity, the class experienced first-hand how fractals work.