Sample MM Lesson Plan

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= Sample Lesson Plan (Martian Math) =

Workflow
A factory line approach may be adopted where your students change roles, as cutters, folders, tapers, construction site assemblers. You need a stream of left and right handed versions, a place to build inventory. Building a regular tetrahedron and octahedron from these modules should be a fun and engaging process, instructive and sociable. Those wishing to run the whole process alone will have done each job in sequence, so will have all the skills necessary to complete the job as home work.

Optional: build Couplers from MITEs and emphasize the common twenty-four count in the regular tetrahedron and coupler, which have the same volume. The rhombic dodecahedron, of twelve half-couplers, weighs in at volume six (144 modules).

Remember: A MITE is a MInimum space-filling TEtrahedron.

The rhombic triacontahedron makes a fine ornament in any classroom. The fine line difference between a T and E module, and how this connects to the state standards power law, is a key topic for discussion. The rhombic triacontahedron of volume 5 has 120 T modules of the same volume as both the A and B modules. If you scale up the volume by 3/2, to 7.5, then your face center radius will be phi over sqrt(2). Other lesson plans branch off from here.

In my all-sixth-grade assembly at Winterhaven some years ago, we applied this approach in the auditorium, after watching a slide show about the octet-truss, as in Alexander Graham Bell's architectural studies, and as in Portland's World Trade Center. Students made enough left and right handed As to assemble a regular tetrahedron. We did not have time for the Bs on that day.