Exhibits | Flip It, Fold It, Figure It Out! Playing with Math

Flip It, Fold It, Figure It Out! offers engaging activities with patterns, shapes, and sizes that entice visitors to "play with math." Visitors can tile shapes into pleasing patterns, fold an origami model, and compare how much different containers hold — exercising skills in measurement, arithmetic, and geometry.

Origami Folds

Follow on-screen instructions to fold a cicada, crane, bat, frog, or butterfly. See how origami solves engineering problems and enabled a huge telescope to be launched into space! 

Creating Quilts

Design your own square of a quilt, using fabric squares and triangles to make patterns.  

Tiling Shapes

Discover the relationship between angles and polygons by covering a surface with wooden tiles shaped like hexagons, squares, triangles, and parallelograms.  

Reflecting on Patterns

Play with table-top mirrors to examine examples of reflective symmetry. Look through a kaleidoscope to explore how mirrors reflect and multiply images. 

Shapes in the Shadows

Guess the object hidden in the box by using only the clue of its shape in a shadow. Common household items look surprising when you look at them from different perspectives. 

Puzzling Shapes

How can a 3D shape fit through a 2D shape? Work to fit unusually shaped blocks through holes that don’t seem to accommodate the blocks at first sight. 

Measure Up

Contribute data to a graph depicting height versus shoe size, and make assumptions using all the data on the graph.  

Find the Beat

Create your own music rhythms and see a graphical representation of the beat selection. 

Size it Up

Explore the relationship among shapes (and the formula for volume!) by comparing the size of different cups to see which holds more – a tall, thin cylinder versus a short, wide cylinder. Test your estimation ability by placing oddly shaped bottles in order by volume.  

Patterns Around Us

Where do you see patterns? This display of rugs, floor and ceiling tiles, pots, and photographs help visitors to recognize patterns they see everyday, but might not notice.

This exhibit was produced by the Museum of Life and Science in partnership with the North Carolina Grassroots Science Museum Collaborative. Major funding was provided by the National Science Foundation.