Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s latest video is terrific:
This one is particularly easy to share with kids because there are several puzzles where she asks you to stop and think about the solution. I began the picture frame puzzle as the starting point for our project today.
The puzzle goes roughly like this:
A common way to hang a picture is to use two nails in a wall and run the wire around those two nails. Assuming the nails / wall are strong enough, if you remove one of the nails the picture will still hang. Is there a way to hang a picture with two nails so that if you remove either of the nails the picture will fall?
We took a shot at this puzzle using yarn and snap cubes. It was a good challenge for the boys:
In the last video we got the picture to fall once, but the boys weren’t quite clear what happened – but now they at least knew it was possible! Here we explored the idea more carefully:
Next we finished watching the video and then discussed what we saw (as I publish this post the video preview isn’t embedding properly, but is really just audio anyway):
Finally we looked at two sets of shapes that appeared in the video that we’ve looked at before. The first is a 3d print of Henry Segerman’s “Topology Joke” and the 2nd is a set of “rollers” that we’d made after seeing a Steven Strogatz tweet. The tweet and the roller project are here:
Another fun project from Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s amazing math series. Sorry to be brief on this project, but I had to get this one out quick because of a bunch of activities going on today.