Teacher Institute Projects

Every Friday, students from the class shared their best lesson plans, or sometimes lessons they wanted to try out once before doing in the classroom. In this math activity, we had to try to figure out how many different ways a certain number of blocks could be attached. Reflections would count as different figures, but rotations would not. Three blocks was easy to figure out. Four blocks got a lot harder. I found that I was pretty good at this kind of problem, although I'm not normally a spatial superstar. Then I got fascinated by this problem and tried to figure out how many ways five blocks could be attached. I wanted to see if it would relate to the number of faces or something else. Unfortunately the blocks had been put away by then so I had to do it all in sketching, and I never quite finished.