Make your own Kaleidocycle Flextangle!

Make your own Kaleidocycle Flextangle and learn about geometry!

If you are a fan of Madeleine L’Engle’s book ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and saw the film adaptation, you may recognise this awesome paper toy.

The Kaleidocycle Flextangle is a flexible polyhedron. In the film they used it to show how space and time can be flexed and folded, to change what you see. The flexible polyhedron connects 6 triangular pyramids on opposite edges that can be rotated into a cycle.

Madeleine L’Engle was greatly inspired by Albert Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’. She learnt about quantum mechanics and was fascinated with the theory of space travel! She discovered a concept known as tesseract, which in geometry is a four-dimensional cube.

Madeleine wove these ideas and theories into a story and it became one of the best selling novels of the 20th century.

The story stretched our imaginations across the universe! We follow the adventure of the main character, Meg, as she uses a tesseract to travel through time and space to find her father.

Have a go at making your own and discover the faces of two other inspirational women fascinated by science.