Cool After School: More Domes!

by Vicky on March 8, 2011

Domes were such a hit last week, I decided to spend another week exploring domes.  I showed short clips from the video, Building Big: Domes, including the Pantheon and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.  Then we constructed our own paper sculpture geodesic dome models.

I found a cool website: Domebook: How to Construct Cardboard Play-Domes.  It includes printable scale models, and we built the 3 frequency 5/8 sphere Icosahedron.

At the end, the kids built a tower out of foam blocks and crowned it with a dome.  They crammed a large teddy bear into this imposing lair.  I happened to glance over at them when they were occupied with this stuffing process, and I couldn’t help but think of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare trying to stuff the Dormouse into the teapot.

Since we were focusing on Buckminster Fuller’s work, I also printed out his Dymaxion map, which folds into an icosahedron.  Fuller pointed out that his map had “no right way up.”  When unpeeled one way, one sees all of the continents in an almost contiguous land mass, while a different unpeeling reveals a globe of oceans surrounded by land.

Check out this cool animation from Wikimedia Commons!

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