Visual patterns

We have been making visual patterns today.  We produced figure 1, figure 2 and figure 3 and are working on identifying expressions to explain the pattern.

We are identifying constants (here in red) that never change.  We are also looking for groups of “n” (eg in figure 3 we are looking for groups of 3).  Sometimes we extended the pattern to show figure 0 and figure 4

Patterns can grow in 2 directions at once

Or sometimes they grow on an angle.

These patterns were all built from the same question (figure 2 was shown and we creatively made patterns that could work).

We used some patterns from visualpatterns.org and analyzed them to find the expression.

What is neat about these patterns is that there are sometimes different ways to see them.

We built the patterns

We looked at how many pieces there’d be in each term…and made some difference tables.

And then we colour coded some areas to correspond to some algebra.

We can see squares and rectangles and a constant of 3.

What we will see later is that the algebra works out to the same thing!