Activity:  building shapes

Kind: individual or with a friend, can be a child

Duration: 5-10 minutes

Location:

1. indoors, at a table or on the floor (somewhere where you can retrieve the little white balls which tend to roll away)
   

Instructions:

1. 1)In your course package you will find a little zip-loc baggie with a few balls and sticks of various colours inside.   You will be using these to build some simple shapes.  (your kit may also contain another bag with a bigger collection of balls and sticks, these are not to be used for this activity)
   

WARNING:  these plastic pieces are precision engineered, but they are only soft plastic.  So do not force them, in particular do not attempt to bend the sticks to fit where you’d like them to go.  The little ends of the sticks can easily break off, which renders the stick unusable.

2. 2)Build one or more triangles, one with each colour of stick.
   What do you notice?
   

4. 4)Next, build a shape in the configuration in the drawing depicted below.  Have this second shape ready to show at our next online meeting.
   
   (In most cases you will be using this shape in a subsequent activity; so you can either keep it till then or dismantle and reassemble)