Unifix cubes are colorful cubes that connect in one direction. They are typically 3/4 inch on each side and made out of hard, smooth polyethylene plastic. Most Unifix cube sets come in a plethora of colors -- black, white, brown, yellow, orange, green, blue, red and sometimes even other colors. The cubes have a small platform on one side that snugly fits into the open bottom of another cube. Unifix cubes are hollow and light -- perfect for little hands.
Unifix cubes were originally designed by an English company, Philip and Tacey, in 1953. Philip and Tacey produced Montessori educational materials and designed the cubes for physically representing numbers. Most educational programs used lacing beads for math manipulatives, but there were several problems with utilizing beads. The beads required lacing, a difficult task for small hands, and they often rolled off of student tables. The English company designed Unifix cubes to be an inexpensive alternative to beads. They did not roll and required a simple connection instead of stringing. Unifix cubes became popular in England throughout the late fifties and were introduced to the United States in the sixties and seventies. Since their creation, over one billion Unifix cubes have been sold in the United States.
Unifix cubes can be used for almost any avenue of primary math instruction. Because of the cubes' simple, versatile design, they lend themselves to classrooms throughout elementary school. In primary classrooms, popular applications of Unifix cubes include connecting and counting towers of cubes, creating color patterns, using the cube as a non-standard unit of measurement and creating combinations of ten. In intermediate grades, students are often encouraged to use Unifix cubes for graphing and illustrating addition and subtraction problems. In upper-elementary classrooms, Unifix cubes can be used to provide a visual representation of re-grouping, borrowing, fractions and probability.
Although Unifix cubes were originally designed as math manipulatives, many teachers have found them useful within other content areas. During language arts instruction, cubes can represent individual sounds or syllables within words. They can also show the number of words in a sentence. Students can illustrate musical patterns within songs by building colorful towers. Cubes can create three-dimensional bar graphs to represent data in science or social studies. Teachers continue to find useful new applications for these timeless cubes.