Pentominoes are where polyominoes start to get interesting. There are just enough of them to make it a nice challenge to discover them all (as an extension, see if you can find a way to prove that you’ve got them all).
This week’s challenge is actually about nets. Not the kind that you go fishing with but the kind that you fold to make 3D solids with. We’re making open cubes, i.e. cubes with one face missing.
Here’s an example of a pentomino that is an open cube net. It has been colour coded to show which sides join together to form edges of the cube. Can you see which sides on the pentomino make the top edges of the open cube? Try this with a simpler open cube net. Make sure you you’ve colour coded the correct sides by cutting out the net and folding it together. You can get this and other ways to explore this in this week’s download – Open cube Nets and Pentominoes
Try out this activity and let us know how you got on. You can do this in one of 2 ways:
- Add a comment to this post
- Tweet using #momentofmaths
