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What is Shapes and Nets?
'Shapes and Nets' is a very easy educational software program for primary school
children to use. It contains lots of 2D and 3D shapes including triangles,
quadrilaterals, polygons, circles and segments, prisms, pyramids and
platonic shapes.
Children get to investigate and manipulate all these shapes through a
series of eight 2D and 3D shape activities in the program.
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All the shapes can be moved, rotated, scaled, stretched and you can put
colours or images on them.
Nets of the shapes are neatly organised ready for printing and then
building them into paper models.
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Draw and colour 2D and 3D shapes with just a couple of mouse clicks.
Learn the names of all the shapes;
cuboids, cones, cylinders, prisms, platonic shapes and a host of 2D
polygons and shapes. All the shapes can be rotated, but the 3D
ones can be rotated so you can see how they look from different
angles; or let 'Shapes and Nets' display them in the top, side, front
and isometric views!
Click the Nets button to display all the different shapes
neatly organised on sheets of paper ready to print. Of course, the 2D
shapes don't really have a Net, but they can still be printed out on the
same sheets as the 3D Nets together with the names of all the shapes.
Children learn about shapes, their nets and other properties by carrying
out a series of eight activities provided in 'Shapes and Nets'.
Activities range from simple shape investigation to organising and
manipulating shapes to create familiar objects. There is a Street
Scene for example where all the houses and vehicles are made from
cuboids and wedge shapes, and these too can be printed and made into
paper models. Or how about seeing how different shapes can be used to
make packaging; a prism for Goblerone, a cylinder for Cola, cube for
Jerry's Orange for example! |
2D and 3D Shape Investigation |
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There are two Shape Investigation activities where children drag 2D and
3D shapes onto the screen where they can be rotated and scaled and
rendered either with colours or images.
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Tessellation for kids |
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Design patterns by tessellating shapes. Use basic shapes, irregular
shapes, tetris or try your hand at moving and rotating the fish into a
tessellating pattern.
... more |
Packaging |
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Design a new package for your favourite chocolates or a
tissue box, a can of drink! There are lots of shapes to put images
onto and once your design is complete, display the Nets, print them out
and build a paper model of the package.
... more |
Net of a Dice |
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Make dice with triangular faces using the platonic shapes, tetrahedron,
octahedron and icosahedron. Make a dice with square faces using a
hexahedron (cube) and one with pentagonal faces using a dodecahedron.
Print out the net of a dice and make a paper model!
... more |
Design a Street |
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This simple 'design a street' activity comprises buildings and vehicles
made from simple shapes with nets to print out. The bus pictured above
for example is constructed from a cuboid.
... more |
Kids Solar System Project |
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What fun! a kids solar system project, put images onto different sized spheres to build a solar
system. ... more |
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Shapes and Nets in a nutshell: |
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Shapes & Nets is for Mathematics
and Design & Technology pupils.
Manipulate shapes by translating, rotating,
stretching and scaling.
Learn the relationship between a shapes and their nets.
Build packaging based on the pre-designed product
packages included with the software by printing the
nets of the shapes on to paper or card.
Investigate tessellation by building tessellating
patterns of 2D shapes, both regular and irregular.
Investigate platonic shapes by building dice
with various numbers of sides.
Design a street scene from pre-made shapes,
print the nets of the street shapes and
build a town as a class project.
Become familiarised with third angle projections
for shapes and models.
Consider efficiency by thinking of different
configurations of nets on a page. |
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"I have a lot of fun playing with Shapes &
Nets and making all the different shapes"
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