Geeking out with Zometools

This weekend Moomin and I played a lot with Zometools. We made a rhombicosidodecahedron!

The little white nodes in the picture are all rhombicosidodecahdrons themselves, so we thought we’d try to make that shape with the parts from the kit. Once we figured it out, we added stuff internally to make it look more complicated.

Then we made a buckyball helmet out of pentagons and hexagons!

This is basically the best toy ever. The white node parts have three kinds of holes: rectangles, pentagons, and triangles. The blue, red, and yellow parts are color coded so that their ends fit into a particular shape of slot. You can get completely lost in making weird geometrical shapes for hours!

They were invented by people who were involved with Drop City, a utopian experiment in the 1960s.