Re: Teaching

["Jeff Knope" <jknope@xxxxxxxx>]

On June 10th Andrea asked:

> So how was this done Jeff?  A lot of the students at OWL really get 
> excited
> about making shapes and when I showed them how to make a star when I was
> making spirals, it really caught their attention. I will soon be embarking
> on introducing a team of student leaders (peer teachers) to new and fun
> advanced ideas, and making stars seems like a good way to get them
> interested as well as increasing thier knowledge in the program.

Hmmm.... "advanced" is a relative term.  The Lineweaver program does it by 
making a list of the vertices of the user-supplied figure (regular or 
free-form), and uses that list to compute a new list of vertices of a 
concentric version of that figure, with a given offset.

I'd be happy to get into how to do that.  But I suspect it would be a little 
overwhelming for all but very advanced secondary students.  It requires 
familiarity with list-processing and tail-recursion, subjects that should be 
approached slowly and in a step-by-step way.

To do the job you describe (making concentric stars), there is a far simpler 
way.  And this way has the nice feature of introducing some useful 
triginometry.  Please follow this text while referring to the attached 
images.

The simplest way I know to draw a star is probably this:

to STAR :leg
pd seth -18
repeat 5 [fd :leg lt 144 fd :leg rt 72]
end

This works by first getting oriented (seth -18), and then 5 times drawing 
one point of the star and turning to be ready to draw the next point. (See 
the top pair of figures in the first attached image.)

Because the "origin" of the figure is one of its vertices, when you draw a 
bigger one with the same origin it is not concentric.

So what's required to make them concentric is to start (and finish) in the 
true "center" of the star.  This requires computing the ratio of the 
distance from the center to the "start" point to the length of one leg.  How 
to do that computation is shown in the second attached figure.

to STAR2 :sz     ;;; allows drawing concentric stars
make "here pos
make "leg (:sz * sin 36) / sin 18
pu seth 36 fd :sz seth -18 pd
repeat 5 [fd :leg lt 144 fd :leg rt 72]
pu setpos :here
end

--Jeff

Attachment: stars_gif.gif
Description: GIF image

Attachment: startrig.gif
Description: GIF image