Yesterday while researching muqarnas I discovered a great unit on Islamic art and geometric design put out by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is ready to go and is perfect for a geometry unit.It has several activities which require the use of a compass to construct the designs. My state standards still requires that skill so something like this adds a real life element to the unit.
The first activity begins by having students create a drawing using 7 overlapping circles. It sounds easy but the circles have to be equidistant so as to be even.
The second activity has students find shapes within the drawings from activity one. They find there is a 6 pointed star, 12 pointed star, hexagons, and triangles all within the 7 overlapping circles. The third activity again takes the rosette from the first activity to create triangular and hexagonal grids.
The fourth activity has students go from one circle to five overlapping circles used in the next couple of activities where students find 4 and 8 pointed stars and octagons. Activity 6 has students finding square grids from the circles.
Activities 7 to 10 look at finding patterns for triangular, diagonal, 5 and 7 overlapping circle grids.
The eleventh activity is the one with relevance to yesterday's topic. It has students create six and eight pointed stars out of a circle. The finished product looks quite similar to the shapes used in the Introduction to Muqarnas video from yesterday.
Each activity has great directions and good drawings so its not hard to follow things and end up with a great finished product. I also know that more and more people are relying on apps for geometric constructions because you can find free apps to do the job. I have a few compasses in my class but mostly I rely on the apps myself because the physical compasses can easily break. In addition, they cannot stab each other with an app.
Let me know what you think. I'm off to try a new app I found that looks quite interesting and is free.
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