math them

I've been busy prototyping mathematical toys this year and have had several parents ask me where they can be purchased. I can't really scale my 3D printing in a way that makes sense, so I'll try looking into injection molding or laser cutting when I've got time. In the meantime, my intention was already to make my 3D printing files publicly available, so I'll start with some geometric dissection puzzles.

I've been making tensegrity polyhedra for about a decade now and have never taken the time to write about them for a general audience, so thought this might be a good time to do so. As with my post on modular origami with Sonobe units , we'll be looking at a single unit along with some mathematical insights that lead to a variety of structures.

The artwork of M. C. Escher often incorporated mathematical motifs. Today we'll look at a fun way to make exciting tilings from conventional ones.

Serpentiles allow the creation of richly patterned or random-seeming mosaics from relatively small tilesets. Here we'll take a look at a couple games that make use of a simple set and their colored variant.

Today we'll look at some reconfigurations of the 2x2x2 Rubik's cube that allow for different explorations and lower the floor.

When I was a grad student, I used to keep a basket of burr puzzles on my coffee table for guests to fiddle with. Today we'll look at an activity where students design them before solving them!

I first encountered the locker problem at a math competition in high school. JRMF used to have a version of it on the books called Lightbulbs , but it was retired because it was too app-dependent. Today we'll look at some manipulatives and sequences for a hands-on, in-person version.

I first encountered Numberlink puzzles in the (numberless) Flow Free app and appreciated them because they were a little more topological than the typical logic puzzle.

There are a number of interesting ways to make a two-player game out of coloring the vertices of graphs. We'll look at a couple.

Daniel Kline has been playing around with an in-person version of Panning for Gold and was wondering what other puzzle variants could be done on a balance scale. This post is an attempt to answer that question!