Fractals Have Taken Over

What started out as an attempt to combine art with math for a fabulous home school assignment, ended up a little bonkers. It was innocent enough at first with paper and scissors and colored in Sierpinski Triangles.

Then I found this site.  (Also check out the enlargements of those beautiful models shown mid-way down and then scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and look at those too.  Wow!) My first thought was wow, soda cans! My second thought was er, soda cans? Mathematicians are sorta scary.

And yet, I figured, we could do that. (Maybe not with soda cans though.)  At first, I thought of cut up drinking straws.  I cut three of them into little pieces and realized that was way too much work.  Then I thought, melty beads! Someone had donated a ginormous pack and the associated hardware to the scouts. Hmmmmm.

Yeah, well, I'll spare you the rest of the thought process and skip to the end.

Ta Da!

Not perfect, I know, but the little points don't quite line up right.  Might try the square frame with a Sierpinski carpet next.  Yeah, clearly homeschooling is sending me over the edge.


ETA:  Eliminating bottom-most row of clear beads and putting the aqua frame beads in their place seemed to fix the problem.  I'm sure a mathematician could tell me why this is but I don't think I want to know. ;-)

(Sorry, the treehouse should be continued tomorrow.  I didn't have time to get all my photos together for today's post)