My OLPC Journey Nov 2010
Previous: Sep 10   Oct 10  

Activity No 5

Indulging my passion for tessellations and jigsaws

Tullawong State School

Spent a wonderful afternoon with Sandy's Grade 5 class checking out Spirolaterals. Very successful. Best part was that the children came up with some really first rate suggestions when asked to report at the end of the session. These suggestions were so good that ALL have been implemented! Sorry for the lack of a photo - forgot to take my camera :o(

Here's what it looks like at the moment. Of course much has changed behind the scenes. For example, there is now a library of 124 patterns so patterns are no longer repeated.

Mornington Island

Maybe this one will make up for the previous lack of photo. Sent to me today from a remote island school in the Far North of Australia.

Activity No 5

Maybe primary colours work better?

Nov 9th Tessellations coming along nicely. It now has 7 tessellations including this one from the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. I'm planning to include all 11 tessellations that only use regular polygons.

Nov 11th Several folk have pointed out that there are many more than "11 tessellations that only use regular polygons". Quite true! But I'm restricting myself to the regular tessellations (which use only one regular polygon) of which there are 3 and the semi-regular tessellations of which there are 8 - this is beautifully presented in this pic from the Web:

Nov 26th Sorry to report an unproductive fortnight. Once again I've returned to the task of "sugar-coating" my activities and have struggled mightily! Why bother? Two main reasons:

  • Currently the toolbar offers sharing which isn't available in my activities - this must be confusing.
  • Asking the XO for a "new start" of my activities just produces the old one.
Well ... I've succeeded BUT the new activity "features" an annoying flickering pointer. Research indicates that this is a "known problem". I was just about to give up when I realised that the Physics Activity uses the same programming approach and DOESN'T have a flickering pointer. So now I'm studying Gary's code.

Activity No 6

Nov 30th I've discovered that the "flickering cursor" is a KNOWN PROBLEM and not caused by my program so I'm waiting for it to be fixed. Until it is I won't be able to publish any more activities.

But that hasn't stopped me soldiering on ... activity number 6 is called "Boxes" ... here's a preview: