Activities with tiles proposed in class (Spring 2008):

• How many triangles are needed to make a rhombus? How many are needed for a hexagon?
• Use these tiles to make an animal, flower, house, etc. What is the area of the shape you made?
• Make other shapes (irregular hexagon, etc.) and calculate their areas.
• Can you use these tiles to make a regular pentagon? octagon? 12-gon? etc. (Why or why not?)
• While it is impossible to make a regular pentagon, can you make a nonregular one?
• Can you cover the plane using only triangles? hexagons? etc.
• Create other tesselations (symmetric ways to cover the plane using these tiles of one or more kind).
• Use the tiles to illustrate addtion of fractions (e.g. let the area of the hexagon be 1 square unit, then the area of the triangle is 1/6, the area of the rhombus is 1/3, etc. Then 1/6+1/3=1/2 can be illustrated by putting a triangle and a rhombus together to form half of the hexagon).