• Semi-regular Tessellations. A semi-regular tessellation is made of two or more regular polygons.The pattern at each vertex must be the same! There are only 8 semi-regular tessellations.
• Tessellation creator. An excellent tool to investigate how angles affect tessellation. Ideas for using this resource Could be used by the teacher to demonstrate tessellation to the class, or to start class investigations.
• Then, the tessellations with one or two directions may have their motifs reflected. There will be also a type 1G (G for G lide reflexion) and a type 2G. Type 1G, the rooster:. Type 2G, the dog: Finally, tessellation types 1, 2, 3 and 4 may have their motifs symmetrical. We will have in addition type 1S, type 2S, type 3S and type 4S.

We’re back with another STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) series! This time it’s Summer STEAM Camp. We will be joining up with some other fabulous bloggers over the next few weeks to bring you simple STEAM projects centered around the five senses. This week’s theme is SEE.

The free demo version is available from Tesselmaniac.com. Creator Kevin Lee will be selling education-industry full-featured versions and normal full-featured versions of the program for $30 per copy through his website (www.TesselManiac.com) and educational group licenses with workbooks through Tessellations.com (that's dot-com, not my site, which ends in dot-org.). /clash-of-clan-download-mac.html.

I decided to explore tessellations. A tessellation is a shape that can be repeated over and over in a pattern. The way I explained it to the boys was that the shape needs to fit together like a puzzle, with no white space in between the pieces.

In this post, we’ll show you how to create a lizard tessellation puzzle in the style of M. C. Escher, and at the bottom of the post you can print three simple tessellation shapes to color and cut out.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

When I think of tessellations, I immediately think of the artist M. C. Escher.

I found a lizard template to print (in the style of Escher), and we had fun making our own lizard tessellations!

Step 1:Print the lizard template here. I made several copies, and the boys all colored lizards – from age 3 to age almost 12. The beauty of this project is that even a three year old can color a lizard, and any stray marks will be eliminated when you cut it out.

Step 2: Cut out your lizards. Tedious, yes. And probably a job for mature cutters only, because it needs to be precise.

Step 3: Choose a method for displaying your tessellation. Because of the complexity of this lizard design, I wanted to create a puzzle that the boys could do over and over. BUT, the lizards curled when we cut them out, making it difficult to fit them together. I decided to laminate them. Jordan got me a Scotch Thermal Laminator for Christmas, and I have found it to be very useful. Cutting out the laminated lizards added more time to this project, but it was so worth it! Now we have all these durable colorful lizards. The boys just keep looking at them and exploring them. I’m sure that we will use them for more than just this activity – one of the boys already suggested a hide-and-seek game with them.

Another option for making them more sturdy is to print the lizards on card stock.

If you don’t feel the need to assemble your puzzle multiple times, gluing the lizards onto poster board would be the simplest option for display.

This is how they fit together. So amazing!

Puzzle Tip: The laminated lizards hold up well, but they are slippery. I put some contact paper sticky side up on our LEGO table, attaching it to the table with painter’s tape. Now the boys can do the puzzle without worrying about bumping the lizards.

We also explored making our own tessellation shapes. An easy way to do this is to use pattern blocks. A rhombus will tessellate, for example, so any shape that you build with rhombus tiles will tessellate also.

We cut this shape out of construction paper and then built a puzzle! (As you can see, accurate cutting is a must. But the kids were able to get close enough that they could appreciate the pattern.)

This shape was my favorite.

We made several copies of this one and created a family work of art:

Isn’t that fun? This truly was a fun family project! If I get the time (ha ha – we’ll see!), I’d love to make some more of this shape to laminate. It would be a great quiet activity for Jonathan to build the puzzle while we’re doing our homeschool work.

Click here to print the two shapes above, plus one more: Simple Tessellation Shapes

Be sure to stop by the rest of the posts in the Summer STEAM Camp series!

Magnetic Field Sensory Bottle from Left Brain Craft Brain

How to Make a Simple Kaleidoscope from Little Bins for Little Hands

How to Make a Simple Magnifying Glass from One Time Through

Number Chart Art for Kids from Pink Stripey Socks

6 Comments

1. These are so fun! I'm a huge Escher fan and never thought to make our own puzzles.

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2. We have made several hexagonal tessellations but nothing this complex. A helpful summer idea-thank you.

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3. I love this activity! What a great way to combine art with math. :) Pinned! (And definitely will try this with my son once he gets older!)

   Reply

4. What a great job you did producing the template! Thank you and thanks for sharing!

   Reply

5. You can actually make a tessellation from any rectangle. See the instructions here: https://www.math.nmsu.edu/~pmorandi/math112f00/EscherRectangle.html

   Reply

6. I love your website! As a Grade 4 teacher, I love how your activities are FREE for me, not requiring me to buy a bunch of materials. And I love how it is NO prep! I have used your other article about 5 STEM activities with the clothes pins and Popsicle sticks for about 2 months with my class, they love it! And now, I will certainly be using this one again as it is awesome, no prep & so creative. Thank you!

   Reply

   1. Thank you for your encouraging comment! That made my day! I'll keep thinking of new ideas. :-) :-)

      Reply

Summary

Generates a tessellated grid of regular polygon features to cover a given extent. The tessellation can be of triangles, squares, diamonds, hexagons, or transverse hexagons.

Usage

• To ensure the entire input extent is covered by the tessellated grid, the output features purposely extend beyond the input extent. This occurs because the edges of the tessellated grid will not always be straight lines, and gaps would be present if the grid was limited by the input extent.

• The output features contain a GRID_ID field. The GRID_ID field provides a unique ID for each feature in the output feature class. The format for the IDs is A-1, A-2, B-1, B-2, and so on. This allows for easy selection of rows and columns using queries in the Select Layer By Attribute tool. For example, select all features in column A with GRID_ID like 'A-%', or select all features in row 1 with GRID_ID like '%-1'.

• To create a grid that excludes tessellation features that do not intersect features in another dataset, use the Select Layer By Location tool to select output polygons that contain the source features, and use the Copy Features tool to make a permanent copy of the selected output features to a new feature class.

Syntax

Code sample

The following Python window script demonstrates how to use the GenerateTesselation tool in immediate mode.

The following stand-alone Python script demonstrates how to programmatically extract an extent from a feature class and use the extent to fill the parameters of the GenerateTessellation tool.

Environments

Tessellation Creator Free Online

Licensing information

• Basic: Yes
• Standard: Yes
• Advanced: Yes

Tessellation Creator Free