Welcome to our new on-line activity, pentominoes, that provides a fascinating way of exploring shape and space-filling within a puzzle context.
Pentominoes are 2D shapes made from joining 5 squares together and there are 12 different shapes in the set. Shapes can be rotated and flipped over and many mathematical concepts can be explored using them.
Pentominoes are part of a larger group called Polyominoes. Polyominoes is the general name given to plane (2D or flat) shapes made by joining squares together (the squares must be properly joined edge to edge so that they meet at the corners)
Polyominoes are named according to how many squares are used to make them. So for example, there are dominoes (2 squares), triominoes (3 squares), tetrominoes (4 squares) and so on. Of course, the more squares that are used, the greater the number of different shapes that can be made from joining that number of squares in different ways.
Perhaps you can also think of a very popular computer game that is based on arranging tetrominoes
