Week 11: Soma Cubes
I love Martin Gardner’s work and books that brought math to so many people in a fun and engaging way. One of the topics he covered was Soma Cubes. This week, learners can create and play with this wonderful seven-piece puzzle that was invented by Mr. Piet Hein during a lecture on physics. I love this puzzle because there are so many questions to ask and ways to solve it. There are a few options for creating your own:
Option 1: Wooden cubes
I ordered wooden cubes and found they aren’t perfect, but do the job with students.
Option 2: Sonobe Origami
You can make a Soma cube with a lot of folding. I would recommend doing this with teams and older students (or as an adult). The folds need to be exact. That being said, I have seen 9 and 10-year-olds do beautiful origami Soma cubes. The best tutorial that I was able to find is on the Luck Paper Scissors Blog here.
Here are some questions/exercises:
- How many unique ways can you solve it? Is there a systematic way to track your solutions?
- Are there combinations that will never have solutions (ex: starting with one or two pieces in a particular way)
- What other symmetric constructions can you create?
One of the coolest links to all of the solutions I have found is here on GeoGebra by Michael Borcherds.
Another unique page devoted to Soma is here.