When I was a child, 1980's the Rubik's Cube debuted. I remember at that time only the standard cube was released and the world was striving to solve it as quick as possible. I played it for hours and hours only solving it once or twice by shear accident. Then I basically gave up. My sister tried for a bit, then removed all the stickers trying to show her prowess but we knew the stickers were off kilter, so it was more embarrassing then victorious. But after the initial craze died out my newly stickered Rubik's Cube ended up at the bottom of my toy chest.
Now the Rubik's Cube has had a huge resurgence with fast-paced competitions and speed challenges. In the halls, at the end of class several kids in each of my classes are speed challenging each other with the cubes. I am amazed at how fast and efficient they solve them. Quickest I have seen about 45 seconds. Now they also have every color, size and shape imaginable. Even round ones. Very cool. So I asked around. Were there any students who would want to go to a local competition? I had about 20 confirm and now as a group we went into Houston at the Harmony School and my students competed solo against other students from around the greater Houston area. They did fantastic winning many rounds. This spawned my interest to see how I could incorporate Rubik's Cubes into my science classroom.
I decided to order (on loan) 600 Rubik's cubes so we could design and build a large mosaic from the cubes. They are arriving next week and my kids are going to be so excited. They will each solve one side of the cube and together we will place them into the frame until at the end of the day we have a mosaic. I am looking at templates and deciding what to create this week. I am thinking Einstein or something science related...I will let you know.
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