The art of tiling a plane might have been around for the last 6000 years, but there are still many things to discover about it. These designs were used by the Sumerians (about 4000 BCE) as clay tiles to decorate walls. The history of tessellations dates way back to ancient times. Then, invite some students to share their designs. Let them use the free-polygon tool to create concave quadrilaterals to investigate the answer. Clarify with the students that any two congruent triangles will make a parallelogram which will always tessellate.Īgain, all quadrilaterals tessellate. Activity #1Īfter students explored that all types of triangles tessellate, let them explain their reasoning. Then, you may identify these designs as tessellations and define a tessellation as a pattern of shapes covering an entire surface with no gaps and no overlaps. Share some student work and add some examples if necessary. These examples can be used to emphasize the importance of having no gaps and overlaps in a tiling pattern. Perhaps even the floor of your classroom at school is a good example. Then, ask them to share about the design of kitchen or bathroom tiles at their home or school. Warm-UpĪsk students to draw a bee-hive on blank Polypad canvas and talk about the properties of the bee-hive. This exploration could be used a mini-unit on tessellations that is either used as one sequential unit or as multiple explorations that are spread out over a period of time and interspersed with other topics of study. Each activity below could be a separate lesson plan. This explorations contains a variety of activities around tessellations. This activity can be extended using reptiles, spidrons, sphinx, Penrose tilings, and kite-square activities to design a longer unit. Students will also also create their tessellating design by transforming the regular polygons using Escher-like techniques. They also create their own tessellating design. Hunt using an irregular pentagon (shown on the right).In this exploration, students will use the polygons on Polypad to create regular and semi-regular tessellations. Another spiral tiling was published 1985 by Michael D. The first such pattern was discovered by Heinz Voderberg in 1936 and used a concave 11-sided polygon (shown on the left). Lu, a physicist at Harvard, metal quasicrystals have "unusually high thermal and electrical resistivities due to the aperiodicity" of their atomic arrangements.Īnother set of interesting aperiodic tessellations is spirals. The geometries within five-fold symmetrical aperiodic tessellations have become important to the field of crystallography, which since the 1980s has given rise to the study of quasicrystals. According to ArchNet, an online architectural library, the exterior surfaces "are covered entirely with a brick pattern of interlacing pentagons."
An early example is Gunbad-i Qabud, an 1197 tomb tower in Maragha, Iran. The patterns were used in works of art and architecture at least 500 years before they were discovered in the West. Medieval Islamic architecture is particularly rich in aperiodic tessellation. These tessellations do not have repeating patterns. Notice how each gecko is touching six others.
The following "gecko" tessellation, inspired by similar Escher designs, is based on a hexagonal grid. By their very nature, they are more interested in the way the gate is opened than in the garden that lies behind it." In doing so, they have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered this domain themselves. This further inspired Escher, who began exploring deeply intricate interlocking tessellations of animals, people and plants.Īccording to Escher, "Crystallographers have … ascertained which and how many ways there are of dividing a plane in a regular manner. His brother directed him to a 1924 scientific paper by George Pólya that illustrated the 17 ways a pattern can be categorized by its various symmetries.
According to James Case, a book reviewer for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), in 1937, Escher shared with his brother sketches from his fascination with 11 th- and 12 th-century Islamic artwork of the Iberian Peninsula. The most famous practitioner of this is 20 th-century artist M.C. Escher & modified monohedral tessellationsĪ unique art form is enabled by modifying monohedral tessellations.
A dual of a regular tessellation is formed by taking the center of each shape as a vertex and joining the centers of adjacent shapes.
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