Just in time for the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, the Center of Black Student Excellence at the Long Beach Unified School District inaugurated its new space for playful math. This space is established by the Mathhappens Foundation, and I was honored to be at its opening celebration along with Chris Nho of Mathhappens. It was an exhilarating day, with 200 students from 6 different schools spending time with us in the Math Room over the course of the day. I had the time of my life with these curious and creative students. You can see the Geometiles table in the main image above.
One of my personal highlights of the day was watching a middle school girl construct a parallelogram prism, also known as a type of parallelepiped:
A parallelogram prism is a fairly uncommon shape, and I don’t recall a student ever building it on their own before. The girl was building completely on her own, with no prompts whatsoever. I asked her what led her to construct this shape, and here is what she told me.
She started out with a closed chain of 6 rectangles, like the one shown below (constructed after the event):
She then noted that she could not make this into a square prism (since a square has 4 sides, and 6 is not divisible by 4), and was looking for a different type of prism that she could build using the rectangle chain. In retrospect, I wish I had asked her why she chose to “fill up” the top of the rectangles with a parallelogram as opposed to two squares, or a square and two triangles. It is entirely possible that other students had used up the squares, and that the triangles were the only shape she had left.
We can take inspiration from this girl’s idea for the following activity:
Make a closed chain of 4 or more rectangles. How many different types of prisms can you make?
You can do this activity with rectangles connected via their short sides or, for an extra challenge, the long sides.
How great it is to be the witness of Black Student Excellence, as well as a facilitator of it! You can get a sense of my experience in the short video below.