Exploring Tessellation

I love it when students find different ways of exploring and demonstrating their understandings. Our benchmarks for tessellation are:

• create and record tessellating designs by reflecting, translating and rotating common shapes
• identify shapes that do and do not tessellate

I left it open for the students to find ways to explore the concept of tessellation. As always, they came up with far more creative and varied ways to do this than I would think of:

1. We have been building bridges as part of our unit of inquiry and one student wanted to identify any examples of tessellating shapes in the designs and how this might help strengthen a structure
2. My keen coders set themselves the challenge of coding a tessellating pattern using Scratch
3. One wanted to investigate connections between origami and tessellation
4. Another drew templates to create a pattern
5. Others explored interactive pattern creators (tessellation artist and nrich’s version )

Every student was highly engaged in their exploration and were keen to share their understanding. Turns out the students can plan a much better lesson then me!