PLIX Beautiful Symmetry beta-testing: reflections from the process

[Dave]

I discovered this nonfiction book (“Shapes in Math, Science, and Nature”) in the children’s collection at my library today that has a cool tinkering activity with tiles and symmetrical patterns. I’d like to create a few of these parquet games and have them be available in the children’s makerspace.

I quickly made a digital version of the parquet game arranging 16 photos in the Pages word processor app on MacOS because it has an easy rotation control.

BeauSym Example

I then took a screen shot of a pattern I made and converted it from a .png file to a .svg so that I could import it to Tinkercad. (I’ve used this free file converter site before: Online SVG image converter)
It’s pretty amazing how quickly a simple design can become so complex:

Here is a short video of the two .svg files I imported to Tinkercad. Both files are taken from the middle design in the photo above. One svg for the patterns in black and one for the purple patterns.

BeauSym svg Tinkercad

*Update:
I designed tiles and a tray using Tinkercad. The tray took way too long to print in two parts so I redesigned it to print in 5 parts plus inserts.

Update #2:
I finally finished printing the tiles and tray!

Here is a link to the .stl files in case anyone wishes to print them! (The inserts that hold the tray together should be printed slightly smaller than the original scale: probably around 99.6 - 99.8% scale.)