Fractals from Pennies

 Here's a great activity for helping students see the beauty of math. These are fractals made of pennies (cents) stuck to the wall outside my office. There's a Sierpinski Triangle, a Koch Curve and a Koch Snowflake. They are very easy to make and use the iteration of a simple pattern based on three pennies. There are many mathematical relationships in terms of both a numerical and spatial sense that you can  develop all the way from kindergarten to high school algebra.

Here's my student Lydia Koch's wonderful Math eNotebook assignment on pennies which started the penny fractal idea.  Isn't it an amazing coincidence that her last name is the same as two of the fractals!

There are so many things ot do with fractals when learning math. Here's the Cool Math fractal page , and here's the NCTM fractal generator.

Of course, the sky is the limit when it comes to fractals so here are a few more really cool fractal links.

The Fractal Foundation,
Vi Hart's Fractal fractions.
Fractals in Nature