Cube Puzzle Quartet

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Four Brain-Teasing Cube Puzzles - Can You Reassemble the Pieces into Their Original Boxes? This year at Maker Faire Bay Area, Ultimaker is launching a challenge: Solve one of our 3D-printed Cube Puzzles and you get to keep it! Or 3D print one yourself with these files in four different difficulty levels. Twitter: twitter.com/mathgrrl Hacktastic blog: www.mathgrrl.com/hacktastic Shapeways geekhaus store: www.shapeways.com/shops/mathgrrl This design and all associated pictures and files are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. If you want to use designs, images, or files outside of the terms of this license, please email request@mathgrrl.com. Print Settings Printer Brand: Ultimaker Printer: Ultimaker 2 Rafts: No Supports: No Resolution: .15mm Notes: All of the pieces print without supports, rafts, or brims. Puzzle Descriptions Level 1 = Easy The Soma Cube has 240 different solutions, making it easier to solve than the other puzzles. This puzzle was very popular in the 1960s, and people enjoy assembling the pieces into many pleasing shapes like stairs or pyramids. Level 2 = Medium The Hoffmann Cube is the earliest known 3x3x3 Cube Puzzle, created in 1893. This puzzle has only six types of solutions, up to symmetry. One interesting thing about the Hoffmann Cube is that all of its pieces are flat! Level 3 = Hard The Coffin Cube has only one solution and is also known as the Half Hour Puzzle, created by Stewart Coffin. All four of the puzzle patterns used in our Cube Puzzle Challenge are from Stewart Coffin's excellent book Geometric Puzzle Design. Level 4 = Diabolical The Nob Cube also has only one solution and is notoriously difficult to solve. Some puzzle makers craft this puzzle out of wood, and it is said that the puzzle is so difficult that solvers sometimes resort to examining the grain of the wood to figure out how the pieces fit together. Are you up for the challenge? Classroom Projects Design Your Own Puzzle Cube! Have students use their favorite 3D design software to create their own Cube Puzzles. This project can be adapted for many different educational subject areas and at a variety of levels: Beginner: Use Tinkercad or Morphi to place boxes together to construct puzzle pieces that fit together into a 3x3x3 cube. How do you know they will all fit together into the cube? Print out your puzzle and have fellow students try it out to rate its difficulty. Intermediate: Use Blender, Fusion 360, or AutoCAD to create puzzle pieces, and use fillets and offsets so that the pieces are pleasant to hold and fit together nicely. Create a container box that will hold the assembled Cube Puzzle. Who can make the most difficult puzzle? Fundraising: Print out students' Cube Puzzles and create a solving event where parents and faculty try to solve the puzzles. Raise money for your school or classroom by charging per solving minute, having solving championships, or selling the Cube Puzzles themselves. You can inscribe one of the puzzle pieces in each Cube with text to personalize it for your school or event. Designing with Code: Use OpenSCAD or BlocksCAD to create pieces for a Cube Puzzle by translating and arranging cubes. Add code that creates a puzzle whose pieces can slide together. As a starting point, think about 2D space-filling shapes and puzzles by exploring tessellations and tangrams. Advanced: Use the software BurrTools to construct a Cube Puzzle, analyze it for constructability, and test how many solutions it has. Can you find a new 3x3x3 Cube puzzles that has only one solution? You can also try your hand at more advanced puzzles like interlocking Burr Puzzles or puzzles with unit shapes other than cubes. Print to Order Don't have a 3D printer, or want something fancy printed for you? We don't have the Cube Puzzle Quartet in our print-to-order store yet, but we have other cool stuff you can check out: iframe width="310" height="300" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="//www.shapeways.com/fragments/product?spin=7WY2SF8N3" iframe width="310" height="300" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" src="//www.shapeways.com/fragments/product?spin=NYCRXAV6C