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I plan to have several tables full of interesting creative models. I will include my own models, models submitted by you, and a few creative ideas designed by the people at JOVO. The first gallery below (Inspiration Gallery Pics) shows some models that can be constructed with JOVO Click 'N Construct toys, as demonstrated in the JOVO Inspiration Booklet. Click on the gallery links to see all the models.

Inspiration Gallery Pics - Click on this gallery to pictures of the models from the booklet that comes with the Jovo Click 'N Construct bins. There are many interesting ideas for models, from beginner to advanced. There are quite a few "cheats" in there (models that are not quite accurate polyhedra, but the flexibility of the pieces lets you make them anyway), but they are all fun to make. If you want to see some 3D VRML models of these shapes, check out Inspiration Gallery Models
The table below shows a few more pictures of models done by the makers of Jovo. You can click on the picture to see a larger version.

Creative Models from Jovo

This model shows off some of the System II pieces. If you only have System I, you can use 6 triangles in place of the hexagons, and regular squares in place of the squares with holes. But then your house wouldn't have windows!

I haven't built this one yet, but it should be a fun challenge. Work from the center out to avoid problems with the flat and convex edge connections.

I made a few of these with my kids, and they thought the puppies were so cute. And they are not tough to do for younger builders, since they are made up of lots of joined octahedra.

These guys are fun to make. It looks like an alien and his space ship. If you don't have System II, you can obviously just use ordinary squares.

My 6-year old boy loves planes, so any time he sees a different one, we have to build it. Let me know if you have any good designs!

Really cool and elaborate scene, complete with sand and artificial grass! Note that in the bridge, the 4-7-8 right triangles formed from the cubes don't quite satisfy the Pythagorean theorem. Do the math to see how close it is (a2 + b 2 = c 2).

Most people like having the smooth sides of the JovoToys facing out, but sometimes it is nice to show the ridged side facing out to give your models a different look and feel.

Here you get to see a partially finished ball so you can see how close the pentagonal and triangular prism excavations come to each other. The flower is amazing, but I haven't figured out all the layers yet. Dont't forget that JovoToys can be great for art projects, not just math.

I had fun trying to figure out all the pieces that go into this one! There are a few small cheats in here, but the curved sets of pent prisms and cubes are legit.

Mathematical Models from Jovo

I like building models that use polyhedra to represent the edges of another polyhedron. Here, we have the edges of a Tetrahedron, constructed out of Octahedra (red) and Tetrahedra (white). If you like, you can continue the edges all the way out to points, instead of truncating them.

Whenever you have a figure, you can augment it by attaching other figures on a common face. Here, we started with an octahedron, and replaced most of the triangular faces with triangular pyramids.

Any time you have a flat design, you can make it three dimensional by making another copy and joining them with squares. Here, the result is a star-shaped prism.

Nice close-up shot, so you can see the details of how the pieces connect. My kids like building houses like these, and making a little town.

Sometimes it is fun to make 3D "tiles", and put them together to form patterns.

Since these 3D "tiles" don't lock together you can easily slide them around to make different shapes and patterns.

This is a pretty popular figure, since it uses pentagons, squares and triangles. One neat variant is to excavate pentagonal and triangular prisms or pyramids from it to make it a little more interesting.

You cannot make a true pentagonal ring out of octahedra and tetrahedra (the angles are just slightly off), but it is close enough that you can build them with JovoToys. You will probably feel that you have to push a tiny bit more to get the edges to connect. But the finished "Dodecahedron" edge model really looks good.

Unlike the dodecahedral version above, this model is not a cheat. You can make the edges of a Truncated Octahedron out of octahedra and tetrahedra. But notice that the hexagonal faces of the Trunc Oct are represented by triangles, but the square faces are not represented by anything.

This is quite an elaborate model, made entirely from pyramids and prisms. Click here to go to page 5 of the Inspiration Gallery, where I have a 3D model you can spin around and examine.

These are pretty cool examples of how you can take a polyhedron, and stretch some of the edges to get different models. Then you can excavate or augment to get even more variations. Don't forget to look for tetrahedral, octahedral and icosahedral variants on a theme. For example, in the tetrahedral version of the model on the left, the excavations all meet in the center. Click here to go to the Math Gallery, where I have 3D models of a few different variants, that you can spin around and examine.

I like the cube maze, and it is not too tough to make. The squares inside the hexagons of the model on the right look really cool, but if you only have System I, 6 triangles work just the same.

Thanks also to Melinda Green and Don Hatch for their excellent Tyler Web Application. This free web tool lets you do great flat designs with polygons in just about any arrangement.

All pages on this site were written in Microsoft's Notepad, using Microsoft Paint and IrfanView for image editing. For more details, see my Help Page

Alexander's Polyhedra, (c) 1998-2008, Alex Doskey