We'll take a look at metal objects and how they are made, ranging from common items in your home to industrial manufacturing operations for metals. We’ll talk about the properties of metals versus more brittle material such as ceramics, watch how some industrial processes work, and discuss what engineers who work in manufacturing do. If watching glowing, molten red hot metal sounds interesting to you, join us! We’ll also talk about 3D printing of metals, versus more historical ways of making metals by casting and rolling.

Tessellations of 2D and 3D sounds like fun with math and geometry, and it is! But tessellations also relate to beautiful art & the chemistry of crystal structures. In this class we talk about how shapes like squares and triangles can fit together perfectly to cover a plane ( such as squares and hexagons), and talk about 3 dimensional shapes that tessellate 3D space ( such as cubes). Then we will look at repeating shapes in art, including artists like M.C. Escher and talk about repeating shapes in 3D crystals such as table salt, sugar, and industrial materials such as metals and crystals.