Explain Everything: Pentagon Tilings

It was pretty cool to read last month about a new mathematical discovery in the world of tessellations. A new class of convex pentagon that can "tile the plane" was discovered. Having taught Middle School math for many years and exploring geometric relationships through the study of regular and irregular tessellations, this is exciting news to me! In honor of this discovery I have created an editable Explain Everything project file that has 15 pre-configured slides each containing a class of irregular convex pentagons that tile. The last slide has the newest one.

To create this project file I first did some research on Wikipedia (it was reliable in this case). I then traced the shapes in Adobe Fireworks and created different colored and flipped versions and saved them in Dropbox. Then I imported the objects into Explain Everything and used the inspector to lock the scale and then duplicate. You can select multiple objects to set properties for without needing to group them. It allowed me to make 10x copies of 4 independent image objects. Finally, on the first slide I recorded a short example of the the objects being tiled and included some print instructions as well. Below is the recording from the first slide (the arrow points to the Play button in EE if you download the project file) followed by 5-second silent views of each of the other 14 class examples of irregular convex pentagons that tile. Enjoy!