Minnesota’s Largest Pattern Block Mosaic

by Christopher Danielson

To celebrate ten years of Math On-A-Stick, we built Minnesota’s Largest Pattern Block Mosaic yesterday at the Minnesota State Fair.

A long, thing, white event tent with a banner reading "Minnesota's Largest Pattern Block Mosaic". Inside the tent are folding tables, upon which rest wooden boards and a mosaic of many many pattern blocks.

Careful study of this next image reveals 24 jaggedy “rows” of 7 large hexagons, totaling 168 regular hexagons (with a few more than that in the image above, added later on with the few remaining pattern blocks at the end).

A deep-field shot of the mosaic. There is a large hexagon in the foreground, composed entirely of pink right triangles. Hexagons—tiled together—recede into the distance; each composed of small, brightly colored wooden polygons.

Each regular hexagon has sides that are four inches long, while the shortest side on each pattern block is 1 inch long. One-hundred-sixty-eight hexagons of this size cover approximately 48.5 square feet.

The Guinness World Record for Pattern Block Mosaic is 325.5 square feet. That mosaic used oversized pattern blocks with four-inch sides. If you made that same mosaic with standard-sized pattern blocks, it would cover about 20 square feet. And if you made ours out of those jumbo blocks, it would have covered more than 775 square feet.

In a certain sense, then, Minnesota’s Largest Pattern Block Mosaic was larger than the one in the record books. Here is a link to a video of the world record process if you would like to compare and critique.

We used 50 sets of 21st Century Pattern Blocks, and templates and tools made in the Turtle Manufacturing Facility. Removing the gray darts from the set (long story), each set contained 120 pattern blocks, so our mosaic contained roughly 6000 blocks (the world record mosaic used fewer than 3200).

We are grateful to the Minnesota State Fair and the Minnesota State Fair Foundation for supporting this event, as well as ten years (and counting!) of Math On-A-Stick. We are grateful to the Minnesota Council of Teachers of Mathematics for integrating Math On-A-Stick into the regular workings of the organization. We are grateful to Desmos and Public Math for collaborating to fund the pattern blocks, and to Math For Love for selling us the 21st Century Pattern Blocks at wholesale.