Week 11: Soma Cubes

I love Martin Gardner’s work and books that brought math to so many people in a fun and engaging way. One of the topics he covered was Soma Cubes. This week learners can create and play with this wonderful seven piece puzzle that was invented by Mr. Piet Hein during a lecture on physics. I love this puzzle because there are so many questions to ask and ways to solve it. There are a few options for creating your own:

Option 1: Wooden cubes

I ordered wooden cubes and found they aren’t perfect, but do the job with students.

Option 2: Sonobe Origami

You can make a Soma cube with a lot of folding. I would recommend doing this with teams and older students (or as an adult). The folds need to be exact. That being said I have seen 9 and 10 year olds do beautiful origami Soma cubes. The best tutorial that I was able to find is on the Luck Paper Scissors Blog here.

Here are some questions/exercises:

• How many unique ways can you solve it? Is there a systematic way to track your solutions?
• Are there combinations that will never have solutions (ex: starting with one or two pieces in a particular way)
• What other symmetric constructions can you create?

One of the coolest links to all of the solutions I have found is here on GeoGebra by Michael Borcherds.

Another unique page devoted to Soma is here.