What are tessellations? A repeating pattern of shapes that goes on forever without any gaps or overlaps. You can think of tiling a floor.

Squares, triangles and hexagons are all shapes that tessellate. Mathematician Marjorie Rice discovered some very interesting polygons that tile.

It is fun to color and move around all kinds of geometric shapes!

See how these squares tessellate? If you have only square tiles, there aren’t any gaps between the squares…but if you arranged a handful of pennies on a tabletop there would be gaps between the coins.

Circles do not tessellate and neither do any convex (puffs out) polygons with more than seven sides.