Find some sticks, they could be twigs, or matchsticks or cocktail sticks, or rolled paper sticks, or pasta like spaghetti broken into short lengths, but they must all be the same length.
Arrange 16 sticks into this pattern.
As an easy starter, can you remove 4 sticks and leave 4 quadrilaterals and no triangles?
Here is a puzzle with more than one solution.
Can you make a pattern with exactly 4 triangles by removing 4 matches? Can you do this in more than one way?
How many triangles can you see in this pattern?
What symmetries do you see in the pattern?
The triangles are all equilateral. What transformations map the blue triangle to the other triangles P, Q, R, …?
Some of these patterns are reflections or rotations of each other. How many essentially different patterns are there counting reflections and rotations of a pattern as the same?
Click here for the MATCHES worksheet.
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