I Made a Platonic Solid With AI

I’ve never done anything in 3D. Not once.

So yesterday I asked Jax, the AI I work with every day, if it was any good at three.js. That’s the code library that draws 3D things in a web browser. It said yes. Then I asked if we could make something anthroposophical.

It gave me a list of ideas and I picked the Platonic solids. Here’s what we made.

Drag it to turn it. Use the slider to move it by hand, or tap the names to switch solids. It’s even better full screen.

There are only five Platonic solids. The tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. Every face is the same shape and every corner is the same, and that’s it, there can’t be a sixth. Plato matched them to fire, earth, air, water and the whole cosmos.

The part I love is that they come in pairs. Cut the corners off a cube and the faces of an octahedron start to appear. Keep going and the cube disappears into the octahedron. The dodecahedron does the same thing with the icosahedron. The tetrahedron turns inside out and becomes itself again, pointing the other way.

That’s why we built it this way. A lot of Waldorf education is about watching things change instead of memorizing them as fixed. First graders start with form drawing, moving a line before they ever learn geometry. Goethe spent years watching a leaf turn into a petal. When Waldorf students get to the Platonic solids in the upper grades, they usually build them by hand, out of paper.

These shapes aren’t sitting still. They’re in the middle of becoming each other, and you get to watch it.

I work with a lot of Waldorf schools, and I’d love to hear what teachers think of it.

Now the bigger question. Jax wrote every line of the code. I picked the idea and said “love it” a few times. Did I actually learn anything? Or is this the opposite of what a Waldorf kid gets from folding a dodecahedron out of paper?

I honestly don’t know yet. That’s my next post.