Symmetry in Kaleidoscope Designs

A kaleidoscope  is a tube containing colored beads or pieces of glass and carefully placed mirrors. When you hold a kaleidoscope up to your eye and turn the tube, you see colorful symmetric patterns.

The kaleidoscope was patented in 1817 by the Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster. Brewster was intrigued by the science of nature. He developed kaleidoscopes to simulate the designs he saw in the world around him.

The kaleidoscopes are excellent examples of rotational symmetry. Objects have rotational symmetry if you can rotate them around a centre point through any angle of 0 to 360 degrees and the object still looks the same. We can describe objects with rotational symmetry by the number of times the object looks the same when you rotate it around. This is called the order of symmetry.

Today the students from Anna Vasa School have worked on their own kaleidoscopes using GeoGebra - we could simulate a kaleidoscope, starting with one point.

It was our last activity. Now we are working on the final exhibition showing our projects’ works.