Periodic Table Puzzle / Design Challenge

thingiverse

There have been numerous designs of periodic table devised to group elements with similar properties together. Some of these designs are even three-dimensional, so I employed the PolyPanel connection standard to create a periodic table puzzle that allows you to design your own logical arrangement of elements. See if you can craft a Mendeleev flower, a telluric screw, a spiral table, the left-step table, or Scerri's table. I thought this might be an intriguing educational tool to encourage kids to contemplate the relationships and similarities between elements: "Can you connect the puzzle pieces to keep similar pieces together and their numbers in a logical order? Many have attempted..." This kind of challenge and hands-on activity seems a more effective way to learn about relationships than written memorization of numbers. Therefore, I included what seemed like the most crucial information for categorization, leaving out details such as melting temperature. Whether an element is a halogen, noble gas, transition metal, etc., is usually represented by color on most periodic tables, but most people (including myself) do not have multi-material 3D printers, so I added a shape to represent that classification, simply increasing the number of sides to the shape to show it is a different category. If anyone else can devise a better representation of that information, you are welcome to remix it. Includes both triangular and hexagonal versions of all elements, chosen because they allow more creative shapes to be constructed than squares, but I would like to revisit this project and provide a full set of squares and pentagons as well at some point. You could achieve different colors by switching out filament, using a multi-material printer, or simply painting them (which is probably what I will do). Included the basic, blank panels as well as the element information as separate step files to facilitate remixing.