Interlocking Puzzle Pieces and other Geometric Toys

• Astro-Logix 3d ball-and-stick geometric construction kit.

• Delta Blocks. Hop David discusses ideas for manufacturing building blocks based on the tetrahedron-octahedron space tiling depicted in Escher's "Flatworms".

• Design Science Toys.

• Die-cast metal polyhedra available for sale from Pedagoguery Software.

• Fractiles, multicolored magnetic rhombs with angles based on multiples of pi/7.

• Happy cubes and other three-dimensional polyomino puzzles.

• Interlocking Puzzles LLC are makers of hand crafted hardwood puzzles including burrs, pentominoes, and polyhedra.

• Jovo Click 'n Construct. Plastic click-together triangular, square, and pentagonal tiles for building models of polyhedra and polygonal tilings. Includes a mathematical model gallery showing examples of shapes constructable from Jovo.

• Kadon Enterprises, makers of games and puzzles including polyominoes and Penrose tiles.

• Lego Pentominos, Eric Harshbarger. He writes that the hard part was finding legos in enough different colors. See also his Lego math puzzles and pentominoes pages.

• LiveCube polycube puzzle building toy.

• Mathematical lego sculptures and Escher Lego, Andrew Lipson.

• The MindBlock. Reassemble a chessboard cut into twelve interlocking polyominos.

• Ozzigami tessellations, papercraft, unfolded peel-n-stick glitter Platonic solids, and more.

• Polydron patented polychromatic plastic polygons.

• Polymorf geometric construction set system created by Rick Engel.

• Puzzle World gallery of hand-crafted mechanical puzzles. Includes many geometric toys and puzzles.

• Puzzles by Eric Harshbarger, mostly involving colors of and mazes on polyhedra and polyominoes.

• The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections. Stewart T. Coffin's classic book on geometric puzzles, now available in full text on the internet!

• Qubits, modular geometric building blocks by architect Mark Burginger, inspired by Fuller's geodesic domes.

• Roger's Connection. Magnetic construction toy, scientific exploration tool, executive desk toy, magnet learning tool, architectural design tool, artistic sculpture system, manual dexterity training, and much more! (Make geometric shapes out of steel balls and magnet-tipped plastic tubes.) See also Simon Fraser's Roger's Connection gallery.

• Rombix geometric puzzle based on dissections of regular polygons into joined pairs of rhombi.

• SpaceBric building blocks and Windows software based on a tiling of 3d space by congruent tetrahedra.

• Space Cubes plastic geometric modeling puzzle based on a rectangular Borromean link.

• Stardust Polyhedron Puzzles. This U.K. company sells unfolded polyhedral puzzles and space-packing shapes (including a nice model of the Weaire-Phelan space-filling foam) on card-stock, to cut out and build yourself.

• Tessellations, a company which makes Puzzellations puzzles, posters, prints, and kaleidoscopes inspired in part by Escher, Penrose, and Mendelbrot.

• Tobi Toys sell the Vector Flexor, a flexible cuboctahedron skeleton, and Fold-a-form, an origami business card that folds to form a tetrahedron that can be used as the building block for more complex polyhedra.

• Toys from the Tech Museum Store.

• Zometool. The 31-zone structural system for constructing "mathematical models, from tilings to hyperspace projections, as well as molecular models of quasicrystals and fullerenes, and architectural space frame structures".

• Frank Zubek's Elusive Cube. Magnetic tetrahedra connect to form dissections of cubes and many other shapes.

From the Geometry Junkyard, computational and recreational geometry pointers.
Send email if you know of an appropriate page not listed here.
David Eppstein, Theory Group, ICS, UC Irvine.
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