How Many Seeds Can You Pack?
Pupils explore efficient space utilization in the natural world and uncover how nature masterfully fits form to function through spirals. This encourages pupils to draw connections between spiral configurations in nature and their potential to inspire human innovations and designs.
Age Group: 9-12 years
Duration: 40 minutes
Biomimicry Connections:
In this activity, pupils are guided to understand how nature optimizes space utilization through spiral arrangements, using sunflowers as an example. They replicate this phenomenon by creating their own drawings of sunflowers and packing sunflower seeds in both straight lines and spiral patterns. By comparing the two approaches, students gain insights into the efficiency of spiral arrangements for space optimization. The activity demonstrates how the spiral arrangement of sunflower seeds, can serve as a source of inspiration to improve space utilization in various human applications.
Activity Details:
Tools and Materials
- Ruler
- Paper (one per pupil/group)
- Scissors
- Pencils /markers/crayons
- Sunflower seeds
Description
Nature has many amazing ways of organising things, and one of these ways is by arranging and packing things in spirals. This is because spirals are a very efficient way of using space.
Think about a sunflower. A sunflower has many seeds that need to be packed closely together so that they can grow properly. If the seeds were just scattered randomly, there would be a lot of wasted space between them. But if the seeds are arranged in a spiral pattern, they can be packed tightly together in a way that uses the space efficiently. This allows more seeds to be packed in a smaller area, which is very important for the survival of the plant. Explain this with the following activity.
- Give groups of pupils a ruler, paper, scissors, a pencil and relatively large seeds (such as sunflower seeds).
- Ask pupils to create their own sunflower drawings on paper, providing them with measurements for the diameter of the seed head of the sunfower e.g. 5 cm.
- First, ask pupils place sunflower seeds in straight lines next to each other, filling the seed head. How many can they fit?
- Next, suggest pupils place the seeds in a spiral. How many can they fit now? Explain how in nature sunflowers closely pack their seeds in a spiral form.
Additional Information
Learn more about how sunflowers use the fibonacci sequence (here).