TESSELLATION TUTORIALS ON VIDEONone of these Filmed Lessons are in Tessellations.org. They are all on YouTube.com.
If you click on a link, you will be leaving Tessellations.org where
we cannot 100% guarantee you that you'll only see kid-safe content,
though we've cautiously watched these videos and found nothing a kid shouldn't watch.
From TeacherTube.com comes this tutorial. Use scissors, pencil, crayons, and an index card. Get an abstract geometric tessellation, not an Escher-style one. The result is a translation (slide) style tessellation based on a rectangle starter shape.
TeacherTube follows this up with a lesson about the basic geometry vocabulary (vertex, rotation, flip, translation). I'm sad to say that this second video is a little hard to follow because the writing on the white board is too small to read easily. The spoken narration is quite OK, though.
From MonkeysWithLadders comes a tutorial using construction paper, pencil, and protractor. Get an abstract geometric tessellation, not an Escher-style one.
The teacher tries to inject Escher-style hints at the end, but it's a bit too late because the outline is already "set in stone".
The result is a rotation (turn) style tessellation based on an equilateral triangle starter shape.
Bermuda Jazz 18 shows us an extremely brief history of Escher, followed by the usual papercut method tutorial. As with many of these tutorial videos, the teacher misrepresents the result as "Escher style", but clearly it is not "Escher style". It is abstract tessellation. There is no attempt to take it to the next level by tweaking the outline to make it more closely resemble a thing like a fish, fishhook, or fisherman. (Making a tessellation look like a real thing is the biggest distinguishing feature of Escher-style tessellations).
Teaching Artist George Woidek takes adult teachers through a lesson about the geometry of tessellations with regular polygons and a simple abstract paper-cut translation (glide) tessellation method.
How to make an abstract tessellation using Microsoft Paint, the free painting program included with Windows. This video moves too fast through MS Paint
instructions for a child to grasp, or an adult to learn on a single viewing. On a positive note, this lessons allows you to tweak the shape endlessly. Compare this to the papercut
methods usually taught, which can't be tweaked later on. You'll be grateful for at least one tessellation lesson that allows outlines to be altered later on.
Echo 1 vp 5 Lover shows us a way to make an abstract tessellation in a hurry.
The method is similar to Rachael G.'s "papercut method", shown here on our website.
Arvind Gupta, in the "Toys from Trash" section of his website, shows us how to make a tessellation using a pen, scissors, and construction paper. His tutorial focuses on a very specific design (a bird) that's only slightly more simplified and angular than David Bailey's bird tessellations. Young kids would find it hard to generalize from this tutorial to an original tessellation of their own, but it'd be fairly easy for a clever adult to then go off and make an original design. It's near impossible to tweak the outline once it has been created, which is a flaw of most of these video tutorials. On a personal note, Mr. Gupta's accent makes me a little homesick for New York: he sounds just like one of my favorite professors, Computer Science Prof. Chowdhari.
Pokettens gives us a nice video (with a bit of geometry and math) explaining what tessellations are, both 2D and 3D.
Have you seen or made a tessellation tutorial? Tell us about it.
If it's good enough, we'd like to include it here on Tessellations.org
