mscroggs.co.uk
mscroggs.co.uk

subscribe

Blog

 2013-12-23 
Here is a collection of Christmas relates mathematical activities.

Flexagons

I first encountered flexagons sometime around October 2012. Soon after, we used this template to make them at school with year 11 classes who had just taken GCSE papers as a fun but mathematical activity. The students loved them. This lead me to adapt the template for Christmas:
And here is an uncoloured version of the template on that site if you'd like to colour it yourself and a blank one if you'd like to make your own patterns:
The excitement of flexagons does not end there. There are templates around for six faced flexagons and while writing this piece, I found this page with templates for a great number of flexagons. In addition, there is a fantastic article by Martin Gardner and a two part video by Vi Hart.

Fröbel stars

I discovered the Fröbel star while searching for a picture to be the Wikipedia Maths Portal picture of the month for December 2013. I quickly found these very good instructions for making the star, although it proved very fiddly to make with paper I had cut myself. I bought some 5mm quilling paper which made their construction much easier. With a piece of thread through the middle, Fröbel starts make brilliant tree decorations.
                        
(Click on one of these icons to react to this blog post)

You might also enjoy...

Comments

Comments in green were written by me. Comments in blue were not written by me.
 Add a Comment 


I will only use your email address to reply to your comment (if a reply is needed).

Allowed HTML tags: <br> <a> <small> <b> <i> <s> <sup> <sub> <u> <spoiler> <ul> <ol> <li> <logo>
To prove you are not a spam bot, please type "g" then "r" then "a" then "p" then "h" in the box below (case sensitive):

Archive

Show me a random blog post
 2024 

Feb 2024

Zines, pt. 2

Jan 2024

Christmas (2023) is over
 2023 
▼ show ▼
 2022 
▼ show ▼
 2021 
▼ show ▼
 2020 
▼ show ▼
 2019 
▼ show ▼
 2018 
▼ show ▼
 2017 
▼ show ▼
 2016 
▼ show ▼
 2015 
▼ show ▼
 2014 
▼ show ▼
 2013 
▼ show ▼
 2012 
▼ show ▼

Tags

triangles dragon curves christmas card chalkdust magazine standard deviation quadrilaterals sobolev spaces matt parker mathslogicbot noughts and crosses finite group numbers hyperbolic surfaces determinants gaussian elimination rhombicuboctahedron trigonometry finite element method sport turtles coins bubble bobble logs royal baby squares games bempp bodmas harriss spiral puzzles mean javascript python raspberry pi sorting craft people maths the aperiodical numerical analysis misleading statistics weak imposition mathsjam game of life light a gamut of games flexagons interpolation folding tube maps php fonts go cross stitch guest posts inline code martin gardner accuracy geogebra countdown estimation frobel crochet sound wool weather station stickers big internet math-off logic polynomials simultaneous equations dinosaurs curvature london underground zines binary hats convergence matrices world cup cambridge matrix of minors stirling numbers errors speed pi approximation day radio 4 manchester data visualisation inverse matrices rugby menace manchester science festival advent calendar exponential growth propositional calculus dataset map projections pascal's triangle signorini conditions tennis mathsteroids european cup reuleaux polygons final fantasy realhats ucl recursion nine men's morris game show probability fractals london databet golden spiral draughts hannah fry data gather town braiding oeis error bars pizza cutting approximation youtube asteroids captain scarlet folding paper royal institution football dates live stream phd latex logo newcastle boundary element methods pythagoras edinburgh statistics geometry gerry anderson fence posts correlation ternary chebyshev pac-man anscombe's quartet 24 hour maths talking maths in public matrix of cofactors books chess crossnumber hexapawn machine learning pi programming wave scattering golden ratio preconditioning probability datasaurus dozen platonic solids news reddit computational complexity matrix multiplication christmas palindromes plastic ratio electromagnetic field video games graphs tmip arithmetic graph theory national lottery runge's phenomenon

Archive

Show me a random blog post
▼ show ▼
© Matthew Scroggs 2012–2024