Semi-regular Tessellations

Finding tessellations provides a context for students to practise working out interior angles of polygons and angles around a point, or to introduce these ideas. In order to completely solve the problem, students will need to work systematically, test out ideas and reason carefully. 

Introduce the interactivity to the class, and ask them to consider which shapes you might choose if you wanted to tile an area (with just one type of shape) without leaving any gaps or overlaps.

For each suggestion, use the interactivity to determine whether it does or doesn't tessellate.

 

Ask the class to think about why some shapes tessellate but others do not. If the class have only suggested triangles, squares or hexagons so far, ask them to speculate on what would happen with pentagons.

Click on the hint for some methods for calculating interior angles of regular polygons, if your students haven't met this before.

 

Once it is established that the interior angle needs to be a factor of $360^{\circ}$, challenge the class to construct a convincing argument that there are only three regular tessellations.

 

Next, introduce the concept of semi-regular tessellations:

"What if you were allowed to use more than one type of shape to tile your area?"

Ask the students for suggestions or show them one of these examples:

 

Then introduce the notation describing the polygons around each vertex ({3, 3, 3, 4, 4} and {3, 6, 3, 6} for the examples above).

 

Set students the challenge of finding semi-regular tessellations.

Encourage students to use the interior angles to calculate combinations of shapes which might tessellate. Once they have made a prediction, they can test it using the interactivity or shapes printed off and cut out. (3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12 sided regular polygons to print.)

 

 

 

 

 

It is very important that students try sufficient shapes to verify that the tessellation will work - in this example, the three shapes fit together around a point but the pattern cannot be continued.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once students have had a chance to find one or two semi-regular tessellations, challenge them to find them all, and to provide convincing evidence that they have got the complete set.

Why do some shapes fit together and others don't?

Can you tell in advance whether shapes will tessellate, without using the interactivity?  

Can you organise your work in such a way as to convince someone you have found all the semi-regular tessellations?

Can students explain why some patterns work around a point but don't tile the area? For example, the decagons and pentagons shown above. Challenge students to find other similar examples (which could use polygons with more than 12 sides, such as {18, 9, 3}).

Suggest students read Shaping up with Tessellations.

Move on to three dimensions: Which Solids Can We Make?

Ask students to draw and cut out a quadrilateral on a piece of card. By drawing round their tile, ask them to show that their quadrilateral tessellates. After repeating several times with different quadrilaterals, ask them to comment on what they notice about the four angles that meet at each point.