Central Massachusetts Year of the Teen

During the February school vacation, librarians at the Chelmsford Public Library in northeast Mass did a fun math-based program. Yes, that’s Fun and Math in the same sentence! They are doing a lot of math-based programming this year, and, inspired by the book “All of the Above” by Shelley Pearsall, decided to construct a Sierpinski tetrahedron. It became an all-ages program, that anyone in the community could work on.

Volunteers spent many, many hours cutting out 4,000 tetrahedrons on the Ellison machine. Library patrons taped them together to create small, 3-sided pyramids. During February vacation teens took all the individual tetrahedron shapes and glued them together to form large structures. The end result is amazing.

You can read about it in the Chelmsford newspaper, and see an excellent explanation of the whole project on YouTube . They also have photos on their Flickr site.

Congratulations to the teens, staff and volunteers who made it happen!