847 Compass needles
Magnetic Domains. There are 847 compass needles attached to a disc. Because they are so close together, they influence each other. With a magnet, the compass…
A riddle for intelligent and patient people
Puzzles for the sharp-minded and patient. Trickier than it seems: these eleven puzzles with strings, boards, and rings are challenging. One of them cannot be…
A Table with loose Legs
Three, two, one – stable. How many supports do we need to stabilize a tabletop? Without screws, without glue, of course. Sharp-minded (and experimental)…
All Triangels are the same
Central projection: Using various triangular shapes to cast congruent shadows onto a patterned wall with equilateral triangles.
Angled Mirrors
Many polygons. Two mirrors positioned around an axis at various angles: a simple way to create shapes with many sides (polygons). At certain angles,…
Beam Bridge
The simplest form, but not the most stable. This bridge demonstrates the forces acting on a straight beam when it is loaded and supported only at its two…
Bridge the Gap
Building bridges is not so easy - especially when you are not allowed to use nails, screws or glue! Here you only have nine identical wooden blocks at your…
Christmas Balls
Round shapes, angular gaps. The spheres are indeed round, despite the triangular gaps between them. Can this really be? If a sphere is missing in the…
Conic Sections with Laser
Ellipse, parabola, hyperbolic branch, or hyperbolic arm: Cross-sections of a plane through a geometric body. In this case, a cone. A laser beam circling the…
Convection cells
«Convection Cells» Warm air rises, as does warm liquid. This forces air and moisture to descend in other areas. The structures that form resemble cauliflower…
Conway Cube
Test your spatial imagination. Assemble nine pieces to form a cube. Three 1x1x1 cubes and six 2x2x1 cuboids. It seems simple, what the renowned British…
Do they fit in the Box?
Too big. Or is it? The cube fits into the glass cube. Clear enough. But the pyramid, the star-shaped object? Too big. Some objects appear larger than they…
Elliptical Mirror
This έλλειψις has only one goal. At one focus of this mirrored ellipse stands a rotating periscope. At the other focus, a colored cone. Looking at the…
Find the Fish!
Fits, from head to fins. The fish, the wire frame next to the image, fits in only one spot into the pattern with the "water lilies." The pattern with many…
Gothic Arch and Flying Buttress
With pillars and arches. Like in a cathedral: this is how forces act in a structure with a tall pointed arch and a system of buttresses. What significant…
Ink Fractals
Fingers grow fingers. As the ink spreads between the two acrylic plates, beautiful fractal patterns form. Finger-like structures that resemble ink…
Kalliroscope©
Magic and Beauty of Flowing Motion A vortex generator or rather a spectator par excellence. It allows for enchanting, seemingly chaotic, yet somehow regular…
Liquid Dynamics
Chaotic eddies, turbulent swirls – and calm zones. Turbulences become visible. In the flow tank, they appear in the water. Very similar to what happens in a…
Lying Water Disk
Water shapes sculptures. When two water jets collide, the water is deflected sideways. A water membrane forms, creating a disc. The pressure in the two pipes…
Mirror cubes
Create different figures with coloured wooden blocks and on a mirror surface. What does the built cube world look like mirrored several times?
Möbius Cube Loop
Infinite puzzle. The Möbius strip, assembled from cubes. The building blocks are cubes and corner pieces. The faces of the cubes are painted on their…
Moebius Strip
Loop without end. Most things have two sides, but not everything. Among the exceptions is the Möbius strip. When we ride along it with a small train, we…
Moiré
It’s all a matter of perspective. Black point clouds: this impression is created by two perforated plates mounted one behind the other at a certain distance.…
Non-round Wheels
And yet they roll! With the right rolling surface, even a square rolls perfectly round. This applies to a pentagon as well as to any other regular…
Penrose Parquet
Aperiodic pattern. In the aperiodic Penrose tiling, subpatterns repeat irregularly, even though shapes like hexagons or stars appear throughout. Using only…
Pythagoras’ Theorem - Easy to weigh up!
a² + b² = c² with stars and bunnies. The square of the hypotenuse and the squares of the legs can be weighed against each other, as they are made of identical…
Pythagoras’ Theorem - flows from this
a² + b² = c² The Pythagorean theorem describes a transformation of areas. In a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides equals the…
Quasi-Crystals
Golden rhombohedra. When correctly assembled, the various bodies (cubes stretched along their diagonals and cubes compressed along their diagonals) form a…
Rhombo Puzzle
Rhombo-dodecahedron from parallelepipeds. Twelve building blocks (each consisting of two connected parallelepipeds) can be assembled to form a…
Rocking Roller - the Oloid
Wobbles, but goes straight. The oloid has only one surface. It is the only known shape that fully unwinds as it rolls. This means that every point on its…
Sculptures in stroboscopic light
« BLOOM Revelation » and « BLOOM Accordance ». Sculptures come alive: single images, shown in rapid succession, are combined by our brain into a seamless…
Soma Cube
7 pieces = 1 cube. Each of the seven components of this large cube is a polycube. This means each piece consists of several small cubes. Spatial imagination…
Square Puzzle and the Square to Triangle-Conversion
Disassemble and reassemble – discrete geometry. Square puzzle: Nine square tiles of different sizes. Arranged correctly, they fit into an almost-square…
Squaring the Circle
Everything always has two sides. From one side, it looks like a square; from the other, a circle. It’s all a matter of viewpoint and perspective. The…
T-Puzzle
Frustratingly simple. Four pieces make up a puzzle. When placed correctly, they form the letter T. Child’s play. But: is this task really that easy?
Tetrahedron Puzzle I
Three-sided pyramid, puzzle with two pieces. Spatial imagination is required: when correctly combined, these two equally sized bodies form a…
Tetrahedron Puzzle II
Three-sided pyramid, puzzle with four pieces. Spatial imagination is required: when correctly combined, these four equally sized bodies form a…
Tetrahedron Puzzle III
This puzzle game is mainly about spatial imagination. Four (2 equal) bodies made of spheres are to be assembled to form a tetrahedron.
The big is in the small: crystals
Amazing Order Shake it, please. When the balls come to rest, they arrange themselves into regular patterns. These patterns can be compacted, almost to…
The Circle’s the Limit!
A circle with many corners. Reflect green laser light to form a triangle, a quadrilateral, a pentagon, a … The more corners this polygon has, the more it…
The Tea Leaves Experiment / Tea Cup Experiment
«Everyday Physics» Experiment like Albert Einstein. In a paper about river meander formation, he wrote: «I begin with a small experiment that anyone can…
Thread Models
Straight threads, curved surfaces. Rotatable cylindrical model: a cylinder becomes a hyperboloid. A surface generated by the rotation of a hyperbola. Movable…
Watch Water Freeze / Ice Flowers
Watch Water Freeze Crystals form on the cold surface, like frost flowers on windows, a sight we see less often thanks to better insulation. Here, you can see…
Weird Wheels
Not round, but it rolls round. These discs aren’t round, but when they roll, their axis stays at the same height: solids of constant width. Disc-shaped bodies…
Wobbly Bridge I Arch Bridge / Wobbly Bridge II Suspension Bridge
Suspension bridge – an arch bridge viewed from a different angle and subjected to a different load. Resembling a suspension bridge, the chain bridge reflects…
Agar Cell Diffusion
Use cubes of agar to investigate how size impacts diffusion. All biological cells require the transport of materials across the plasma membrane into and out of…
Anti-Gravity Mirror
Learn how to fly with this neat mirror trick. A reflection of your right side can appear to be your left side. Try this activity and you'll appear to perform…
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