I was invited to lead a large Zome build at SUMaC this past Sunday. I gave the campers three options, each of which was expected to make use of most of the available Zometool parts. They selected the partial truncated 600-cell, a 3D projection of a 4D polytope.
The build was completed in two hours, a remarkable feat considering that most of the team were Zometool novices. Most of this can be attributed to the fact that all of these students are very sharp. I also prepared interactive 3D build instructions, seen below, and printed QR codes for them to scan. Mobile phones and tablets were put to good use, and they could largely self-direct to assemble the model.
We did have one hitch. When I designed this model, I failed to notice that the bottom was actually in two layers! The students detected this almost immediately, and I had to scramble to identify what we needed. The result was some triangular “feet” added at a few spots, which you can see in the (now somewhat inconsistent) build steps above. We got this wrong, initially, but corrected it quickly.
