Tessellation Packet

This semester we have been using a homemade Tessellation packet instead of chapter 7 in the book. I am going to summarize everything from that packet into a single post, please comment if you would like to add comments to what I have.

I think that Tessellations are a great way to learn about math. There are a few things I wish I would have done differently.

First I wish I would have looked at this as more of an Art Unit. Great art is born under constraint, or at least that is what I heard some rock and roll group say on the radio one day. With tessellations we are constrained to the operations on tessellating shapes. The next time I teach tessellations I would like to challenge my students to think more creatively about the subject. I think I had too much of a cut and paste approach, until the final project the students were never asked to create their own tessellation.

Second, I would like to increase the math content I use in my discussion. While I did discuss vectors briefly I found that I didn't go in depth because little was asked of the students in the packet. Tessellations would be a good topic to lead into, or follow a discussion on transformations acting on points in a coordinate plane.

I'm still waiting for my final projects to come in, and when I have some pictures I will try and post them.

Cheers,
Mr. Sevre