Symmetry Challenge

How many symmetric designs can you make on this grid? Can you find them all?
Exploring and noticing Working systematically Conjecturing and generalising Visualising and representing Reasoning, convincing and proving
Being curious Being resourceful Being resilient Being collaborative

Symmetry Challenge printable sheet

In this activity, we are going to shade the squares of this grid with one colour to make different designs.



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Symmetry Challenge

There are a few rules that our designs need to follow:

  • Whole squares have to be shaded, rather than parts of squares.
  • Each design must have at least one line of symmetry.
  • Each new design you come up with must be different from all of the others. If two designs would look the same if you rotated or reflected them, they do not count as different designs in this task.

Have a go at making some designs. How many can you find? You might like to shade your designs on squared paper or on this sheet of blank grids.

If you wanted to find every possible design, how would you do this?