Triangles! Day 2, Week 7, SF

Day 2 of the great triangle experiment here in San Francisco! 

Camilo cuts an 8' board with a 30d miter. The truss bridge group hit the ground running this morning! They ended yesterday with such a solid plan for how to build their bridge, everyone felt ready to go this morning. 

How many different ways can you build a triangle out of wood? How does the miter guide on the chopsaw work? How long is a hypotenuse in relation to to its adjacent sides? We had so many great questions to address  today at camp! 

Claire cuts a perfect equilateral triangle out of plywood on the bandsaw. One design idea for the dome group is to connect boards together at the ends using triangular gussets, in order to avoid cutting so miters. Claire got straight to work on the prototype! 

While the bridge group started today with a detailed plan, the dome and pyramid groups still had some figuring out to do--what's the minimum number of triangles to make a spheroid? How long will the sides of our pyramid be? If the miter guide on the chopsaw cuts up to 50d miters, how will we cut the angles for equilateral triangles? 

Eve got really familiar with the miter guide on the chopsaw today! The miter guide starts at 0d, so it's important to remember that you're cutting a certain number of degrees off 90, or cutting degrees off the end of the wood. So, if we cut 30d off the end of a 36" board, we'll end up with the 60d corner of an equilateral triangle--perfect! 

After fixing one of the boards (one was cut like a parallelogram instead of like a trapezoid, did you catch that?), Jasper, Wolf and Eve successfully built triangle number one! 

The dome group's polydron model for their wooden dome. 

Isadore and Peter start to stage some of their equilateral triangles, while they figure out how they'll put them together to make the dome.  

First things first, the pyramid group needed to get the center beam upright. 

Jayden makes a drawing to show Ethan how they'll be able to connect two shorter pieces to make the extra long board for the sides of the pyramid. 

And here it is in real life! Great work everyone! 

These tinkerers are already have so many beautiful realizations about shape, length and quantity relationships. It's a great thing to participate in! The work we do is social, spacial, artistic, mathematic and physical. And it's great when the kids start to notice that too! And apply some things they've learned at school to make big, cool things to play with. 

Siri explains how she realized that, since they used 8' boards to make the trusses, their total height will be shorter than 8', which is what they had planned.