We have a winner this month! Yup, that's his picture at the top of the page. Tim Peterson, who's in 7th grade and goes to school at home, submitted almost exactly what I was looking for in a solution! I imagined that a number of people would be able to figure it out - and they did - but I thought the hard part would be how to explain it clearly - and it was! But Tim pulled that off wonderfully. He not only uses really (really!) impressive pictures, but he gives the coordinates of the vertices of the figure in three-dimensional space, which is exactly what I was hoping someone would do! That leaves no room for misunderstandings. Even without the pictures, I would have been able to tell exactly what he did.

He also shows how to get the "views" of the shape that I used when I posed the problem, and then shows a couple more that seemed interesting.

You'll have to visit his page for yourself to see it all. One thing that I wish he had done was to say a little bit more about how he built his original model out of Tinker Toys. I built mine using ZomeTool because that's what I had here in the office, but Tinker Toys were my first thought. Maybe he'll add on a paragraph about that after he reads my comments. (Yes, Tim, that's a hint!) Otherwise I'll have to add a few thoughts of my own to this page.

I had a lot of people writing to me during the month saying that they were working on building the mobile in their class, but that they would not send in any solutions... so could I please tell them how to do it. Not a chance! Teachers don't have to know any more than kids to do stuff like this. Face it, the kids might be better at it! (Besides, I hadn't written up a solution yet, having just figured it out for myself when I posted the problem.)

Congratulations to Tim!

My co-worker Ron was intrigued by this model, and decided to put it into a 3-d program so that we could have a 3-d model, like Tim's, but one that you can really see in three dimensions! Just cross your eyes until you get a third picture in between the other two.

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