Combining Tessellations, Pentominoes, and Legos!
“Orange is what red and yellow can do when they combine efforts. If you paint only with red, you will get what only red can do. If you paint only with yellow, you will get what only yellow can do. But when you paint with red and yellow, you will get new possibilities, fresh solutions, vibrant outcomes. When you think orange, you see how two combined influences make a greater impact than just two influences.
A tessellation is essentially a pattern of shapes that fit together perfectly, leaving no empty spaces. There are three types of tessellations:
1. Regular- repeating regular polygons. 2. Semi-Regular- Two or more regular polygons. 3. Demi-regular- Curvy shapes, circle, etc. |
A pentomino is a plane geometric figure formed by joining five equal squares edge to edge.There are twelve pentominoes.
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Legos is a popular line of building blocks.
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First things first
When I first began my project I couldn't decide if I wanted to work with tessellations or pentominoes so I came to conclusion to work with both. Then I thought what could I do besides draw out tessellations using the pentominoes and I got the idea to build a 3D figure using some Legos I had sitting around.
Then I had to decide which pentominoes would work best while using the least amount of Legos to build each individual one. Doing some quick calculations I found it would work best if I used a 2x2 Lego for each square in the pemtominoes (i.e. the x pentominoe is made up of 4 2x2 Legos). Once I had my numbers down I chose to use four pentominoes in my figure. I chose to use the X, the L, the W, and the I. They seemed to stack better.
Then I had to decide which pentominoes would work best while using the least amount of Legos to build each individual one. Doing some quick calculations I found it would work best if I used a 2x2 Lego for each square in the pemtominoes (i.e. the x pentominoe is made up of 4 2x2 Legos). Once I had my numbers down I chose to use four pentominoes in my figure. I chose to use the X, the L, the W, and the I. They seemed to stack better.
Putting It All TogetherOverall I think the building process took the longest. It took me about 7 hours total just to construct the individual pieces and to bring them together as a tessellation. Then I began moving things around to see what order I should build in. In the end I ended up building the X walls first, then on top of those I built the W wall, then the L, and the I.
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