Have you ever seen the stop sign in the street and wondered what the shape of the sign called? Here are five outstanding facts about octagons for kids.
Let’s talk about a super cool shape called an octagon. It’s a shape that lives on a flat surface and has eight awesome sides. The name ‘octagon’ is a fancy way of saying ‘eight sides’ – ‘octa’ means eight, and ‘gon’ means sides. Pretty cool, right?
But guess what? There’s even more fun stuff to learn about an octagon. If you start connecting corners (we call these corners ‘vertices’) that aren’t next to each other with straight lines (these are called ‘diagonals’), you’ll end up with 20 lines crisscrossing inside the octagon. It’s like a secret web hidden inside! Below, you can see how it looks.
Octagons, those shapes with eight awesome sides, come in two types: regular and irregular. Now, a regular octagon is like a perfect team where everyone is equal. All its sides are the exact same length and all the angles where the sides meet? They’re each a perfect 135 degrees – just like slices of a pizza pie!
An irregular octagon is a bit more like a wild party. Not all sides and angles are the same. Some sides might be long, some might be short. The angles could be all sorts of sizes, not just 135 degrees. Both types of octagons are super cool in their own ways, just like you and your friends are all cool in your own unique ways!
Let’s chat about the irregular octagon. This is a fun shape where not all sides are the same length, and not all angles are the same size. It’s kind of like when you and your friends line up – you’re all different heights and sizes, right? An irregular octagon is just like that!
But here’s a super cool fact: even though all the angles in an irregular octagon are different sizes, if you add them all up, they always total to 1080 degrees! That’s like magic, right? It’s as if all the different angles have made a secret promise to always add up to 1080.
A convex octagon is like a well-behaved balloon that always puffs out and never pinches in. That means it has no angles pointing inward, and all its angles are less than or equal to 180 degrees.
Now, a concave octagon is a little bit different. Imagine if the balloon had a dent or a ‘cave’ in it – that’s what a concave octagon looks like. It has at least one angle that’s bigger than 180 degrees, making it look like it has a little cave inside. Isn’t it cool how shapes can be so different?
(Think: concave has a “cave” in it).
The perimeter of a polygon is the total length of its boundary. In order to calculate the perimeter of an octagon, the length of all the sides should be known. We know that in a regular octagon, all the sides are of equal length. Therefore, the formula that is used to find its perimeter is,
Perimeter of an octagon = Sum of all its sides
Perimeter of a regular octagon = 8a (Where ‘a’ is the length of one side of the octagon).
We hope you enjoyed learning about octagons, check out these articles about some other shapes: Polygons, Geometric Shapes, Isosceles Triangle, Pentagon, and 2D and 3D Shapes.
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