1. UKS2 Topic: Early Islamic Civilisation
Block D: The rise and fall of Baghdad
Session 3

2. Take a look at these pictures
Can you describe the patterns?
What branch of maths are they all examples of?

3. Moulded tile panel: CE 13th–14th century, Nishapur, Iran
Image:

4. Tile panel:
CE 13th–14th century,
Kashan, Iran

5. Tile panels: Alhambra, Spain
Images:

6. TESSELLATION

7. Exploring Islamic Art forms: Experimenting with Tessellation

8. https://nrich.maths.org/6069
Regular tessellations use identical regular polygons to fill the 2D space.
The vertices of each polygon must coincide with the vertices of other polygons.
Use the Tessellation Interactivity on the NRICH website to explore which polygons can be used to make a regular tessellation.

9. These are the only three!
Which polygons can be used to make a regular tessellation?
These are the only three!

10. Semi-regular Tessellations (or Archimedean tessellations) have two properties:
They are formed by two or more types of regular polygon, each with the same side length;
Each vertex has the same pattern of polygons around it.
Use the Semi-regular Tessellation Interactivity from NRICH to explore this family of patterns.

11. You can describe this with the ‘code’ 3,6,3,6
as this is the pattern of polygons around any given vertex.

12. And this would be
4,8,8

13. What others did you discover?
Challenge your friends to make the pattern of shapes, just given the numerical ‘code’…

14. Which three regular polygons are used in this pattern?
equilateral triangle
square
hexagon
What is its code?
3, 4, 6, 4

15. How many sides on the biggest polygon here?
A 12-sided polygon is a
DODECAGON
What is its code?
4, 6, 12

16. Can you see the 3, 12, 12 tessellation that underlies this design?

17. Print your favourite patterns Stick them in your sketchbook
Annotate them with shape descriptions, their semi-regular tessellation ‘code’, and any mathematical patterns you can see…