Tālofa lava!
It’s Samoan week! What connections do you and your students have with Sāmoa?
Did you know that Samoan is the third most commonly spoken language in NZ following English and Māori? useful Samoan phrases
Mathigon sharing their section on symmetry groups and wallpaper designs was very timely this week as the siapo patterns are full of symmetry and geometric shapes.
“A pattern can have more than one type of symmetry. The symmetry group of a geometric object is the collection of all of its symmetries (as well as the identity). These groups don’t tell you much about how the pattern looks like (e.g. its colours and shapes), just how it is repeated. Multiple different patterns can have the same symmetry group – as long are arranged and repeated in the same way. It turns out that, while there are infinitely many possible patterns, they all have one of just 17 different symmetry groups. These are called the Wallpaper Groups. Every wallpaper group is defined by a combination of translations, rotations, reflections and glide reflections.” https://mathigon.org/course/transformations/symmetry-groups
Use the interactive at this link in Mathigon to create your own patterns ( scroll down to find it)
Watch how to make a Samoan snowflake from a teacher St Peter Chanel school in Green Island Dunedin
Which of the 17 symmetry groups does the Samoan snowflake belong to?
image taken from Facebook
