Penrose tiles

Principle: tesselations (repeating and non-repeating)

What to do with them:

Make patterns
"Tile" floors

Construction:

Magnetic version: The tiles are magnetic cutouts that stick to an enameled steel board.
Other version: The tiles are painted wood or molded plastic.

It is useful in the cases where the tiles have to be cut that even though it's possible to make non-repeating patterns using both shapes, they'll also make very simple repeating patterns when used separately. This reduces waste during manufacturing.

Durability:
There isn't much you can break here. The plastic or wooden tiles would be fairly indestructible, although it would be possible to lose them. The color might strip off the magnets, but that would take a while.

Safety:
The corners of the shapes should be rounded. Also, to be safe for small children the tiles would have to be rather large to prevent swallowing (and probably this still won't help with the magnetic version.) For the magnetic version, a round steel board would look nice and automatically not have sharp corners, but might be more expensive to make. A rectangular board with rounded corners would also work. Unfortunately, the board is probably rather effective for whacking others on the head. The magnetic version would be best used by older children, who would be more impressed by the non-repeating tiling anyway.

Margaret DeLap
39-245 D