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Dressing Mr. Cube

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Challenge

Within the metaphoric situation ‘The Dressmaker’, pupils are asked to make a pattern for clothes for the Cube. To do this the following are available: a model of a cube, six squares of the same size as the faces of the cube, stickers, a big sheet of paper and pencils

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Challenge

• The task was presented as a story: Mr. Cube has just arrived on Earth coming from the Cube Planet and he has no clothes.

• We have to find as many clothes patterns for him as possible.

• Each pattern will be made of six squares.

• We have to make sure he can put on the new clothes.

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Challenge

• As a supplementary task: find the “zippers” of the clothes.

• The clothes should be coloured in an attractive way.

• Find the symmetrical patterns.• Are they all in pairs?• Have you found all the nets?

How many are there?

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Comments

• The constructivist approach is obvious.

• The metaphoric language is clear, the clothes are the nets of a cube. Its role is to appeal to real life situations.

• The cube is not a building block anymore, but an “individual”.

• The real challenge is not to find a net, but all the possible ones.

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Creating the net

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Trying a net

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Embellishments

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Some help

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Team work

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Let me show you!

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Zippers

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A bit of chaos

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A mistake

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Results

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Another result

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Are these all?

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Colours

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Comments: strong points

• Some of the pupils had the idea of using first pins instead of stickers to connect the squares.

• They grasped the “zippers” idea very quickly.

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Comments: strong points

• Some groups shared roles and therefore worked very quickly. They even expressed the cause of their efficiency: teamwork.

• They had the idea of having five fixed squares and a mobile one, in order to find more nets.

• They found the symmetrical nets (“brother and sister”).

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Comments: weak points

• A funny one: after finding two symmetrical nets, they turned one of them upside down and said: we have triplets!

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Conclusions

• It was a task the pupils particularly enjoyed, despite the time and effort they had to put into it.

• It took them into 3-dimensional space and had a “story” attached to it, these are two of the reasons it was so popular.

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Follow-up

• Create at least one clothes pattern for Mr. Cube’s family: his parents, Mr. Cuboid and Mrs. Prism, his wife, Mrs. Sphere and their son, the young Cone.

• Is this always possible? Why? Which member of the family can only get one pattern and which one none?