  During their pre-university year, six brilliant and motivated students joined
the educational project "From Soccerene to Fullerene" (acronym FSTF) proposed
by five teachers from the Departments of Physical Education and of Mathematics
and Physics at the Scientific High School "G.B. Grassi" in Latina (Italy). The
pupils investigated the fullerene buckyball (C60) also known as soccerene for
its football-shaped structure (truncated icosahedron). From plastic sheets they
cut twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons, with a calculated edge, sewing them
together on a polystyrene sphere as faces of a soccer ball; they repeated the
same operation twice, making two almost identical soccer-like balls. That
multidisciplinary experience started on March 2013 and ended on June 2013. It
was satisfactorily discussed in the 2013 school-leaving examination and raised
a great interest both in the 100th national conference of the Italian Physical
Society (Pisa, 2014) and in the ATINER's 9th annual international conference
EMS (Athens, 2015). Now we briefly illustrate the FSTS, focusing on its
mathematical features.
