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Sierpinski Christmas Tree

We’ve been doing origami and papercrafts in Art for the last few weeks. Brent had sent me a link for THIS page, and we assembled the cubes. I also assembled the octahedron, because I was curious to see if I could.

The box is easy and fun.

The box is easy and fun.

In the sidebar, there was a link to make a Christmas tree out of paper. I clicked it. HERE is the page, and HERE is the original blog entry by the teacher who did it.

The idea is that you make paper tetrahedrons, and tape them together to make a Sierpinski Triangle. The process is time-consuming, but the result is fascinating. We only got enough tetrahedrons made for three of the 16-piece tetrahedrons. One more 16-piece, and we could have assembled a 64-piece tetrahedron.

Part of the difficulty of the project was that assembling the tetrahedrons takes precision and patience, and most of the kids weren’t feeling much like being precise and patient at the end of a Friday. There were many paper cutters and paper folders, but the taping was done only by me and one other.

Still, it’s kind of exciting. I think I’ll have us continue so that we can have a final product and a fractal Christmas tree. Maybe I’ll make the top tetrahedron out of yellow paper. It’ll look like a star!

3 Comments

  1. Carol

    One of the electives at Trinity in Joppa (where I pinch hit 2 days/week) is origami, and the lady who leads the middle schoolers through it has done some cool figures – but nothing like this! I’ll have to share your blog with her next week, though I doubt her crew would be any more patient or precise.

    Wonder if there was an origami Advent wreath anywhere? Hmm…

  2. Lauren

    Holy cats! Those are crazy! How on earth?? I will have to go look at those links, but man – those are so cool!

  3. Michele

    Love this! Can’t wait to see the finished product.

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