Monday, August 31, 2009

40 maths shapes challenges

Forty shapes to make in Scratch or some other version of logo, such as Turtle Art. It's hard to see the thumbnail but click on it for a larger view.

This is one of the best sheets ever for teaching maths (designed by Barry Newell):
  • the logo turtle or scratch cat acts as a transitional object between the concrete maths shape and the abstraction of the script that makes the shape
  • the sheet includes both simple and complex shapes, increasing in order of complexity, there is a challenge there for everyone
  • many of the more complex shapes are made up of combinations of the simpler shapes



Source: Barry Newell's Turtle Confusion (1988)

4 comments:

Dennis Daniels said...

I've taken on your challenge and it's not easy! :)

Posted a few of my half-brained attempts on Youtube.

Search recent Turtle Art posts on Youtube.

Bill Kerr said...

hi dennis,

Good luck with it.

It would be good if Sugar had a website like Scratch where work could be posted in one place on the web - and the software made that easy too.

I had a student last year who nearly completed all 40 challenges in Scratch and I asked her to tidy them up and post to the Scratch site. It didn't quite happen because we ran out of time but the concept was good.

Unknown said...

Dennis
I looked at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PqN9HKbeeU

In the video you say its a pity you can't collapse named stacks, which is true, but you can scroll the canvas and shift stacks into a less viewed area of canvas.

Tony

DanielAjoy said...

Hi Bill, I know of two other similar resources

This 11MB document

55 Tasks for Scratch turtle graphics



And my page:

80 geometrical constructions