Dodecahedra
Hi there,
Have you ever seen a dice? You know, those small cubes that you roll to play games? Well, imagine if instead of being a cube, it was a shape with 12 flat sides (called faces) that looked like a bunch of pentagons stitched together. This shape is called a dodecahedron (duh-deck-uh-hee-dron).
Each face on a dodecahedron looks like a shiny stop sign or a star-shaped soccer ball. If you look inside the dodecahedron, you’ll see that it has 20 corners (called vertices) where three sides of the pentagons meet.
Dodecahedra are pretty cool because they show up in lots of places. For example, imagine you were looking at a soccer ball really closely. You’d see that it’s made up of lots of hexagons and pentagons. If you put a dodecahedron inside the soccer ball, with one of the dodecahedron’s pentagons lining up with each of the soccer ball’s pentagons, the rest of the dodecahedron’s faces fit perfectly with the remaining areas of the soccer ball. Cool, right?
Dodecahedra are used not only in soccer balls, but also in architecture and art. Structures like the domes on certain buildings and some geodesic domes are made using dodecahedra shapes. Artists also love to draw and sculpt them since they have such a unique and interesting shape.
Have you ever seen a dice? You know, those small cubes that you roll to play games? Well, imagine if instead of being a cube, it was a shape with 12 flat sides (called faces) that looked like a bunch of pentagons stitched together. This shape is called a dodecahedron (duh-deck-uh-hee-dron).
Each face on a dodecahedron looks like a shiny stop sign or a star-shaped soccer ball. If you look inside the dodecahedron, you’ll see that it has 20 corners (called vertices) where three sides of the pentagons meet.
Dodecahedra are pretty cool because they show up in lots of places. For example, imagine you were looking at a soccer ball really closely. You’d see that it’s made up of lots of hexagons and pentagons. If you put a dodecahedron inside the soccer ball, with one of the dodecahedron’s pentagons lining up with each of the soccer ball’s pentagons, the rest of the dodecahedron’s faces fit perfectly with the remaining areas of the soccer ball. Cool, right?
Dodecahedra are used not only in soccer balls, but also in architecture and art. Structures like the domes on certain buildings and some geodesic domes are made using dodecahedra shapes. Artists also love to draw and sculpt them since they have such a unique and interesting shape.
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