Periodic Table Puzzle / Design Challenge

Last crawled date: 4 years, 2 months ago

There have been various designs of periodic table to try to keep together elements with similar properties. Some are even 3D designs. So I used the polypanel connection standard to design a periodic table puzzle to allow you to design your own logical arrangement of elements.
See if you can make a Mendeleev flower, a telluric screw, a spiral table, the left-step table, or Scerri's table.
I thought this might be an interesting educational tool to get kids to think about the relationships and similarities between elements: "Can you connect the puzzle pieces to keep the similar pieces together and their numbers in a logical order? Many have tried..." This kind of challenge and hands-on activity seems a better way to learn about relationships than wrote memorisation of numbers. Therefore, I included what seemed like the most important information for categorisation, leaving out information like melting temperature.
Whether an element is a halogen, noble gas, transition metal, etc, is usually shown with colour on most periodic tables, but most people (including me) don't have multi-material 3D printers, so I added a shape to represent that categorisation, simply increasing the number of sides to the shape to show it is a different category. If anyone else can come up with a better representation of that information, you're welcome to remix it.
I went with triangular panels because it allows more creative shapes to be built than squares, but I'd like to go back and provide a full set of squares, pentagons, and hexagons at some point.
You could get different colours by switching out filament, using a multi-material printer, or simply painting them (which is probably what I'll do).
Uses standard polypanel connectors.