Friday becomes Wednesday – (due to confirmations in the school schedule) it’s all going to be a moveable feast for the Cavehill diamonds as next week there are computer overhauls in the school and then it’s half term…so we have to cram in a lot this week to keep us going!

I got sent  a handful of  gems:

These are by Luke D,  Luke Q, Eve, Ellie and Caolan ~ I love them ~  Here is what Ellie had to say:

“I drew a crystal using just triangles and different shades of pink.
I first started of by drawing 22 dots on the page; next I drew lines to connect the dots. I had to make sure that every shape I made with the lines were triangles or else the crystal wouldn’t work. I then chose a colour (PINK!) and coloured in four triangles in that colour. Next I chose a lighter shade of pink and coloured in four triangles again in that colour. I took lighter shades until I made this! A pink crystal

and this is what Luke Q said:

 “You can use different types of triangles such as equilateral, isosceles and scalene triangles. Today I went on RM colour magic. Next I did lots of dots, once I had done that I did a line around the outside of the shape. Soon I drew lots of lines joining up the dots in the inside to make triangles. To finish the piece I used loads of shades of blue to make it look like a sapphire.”

In upcoming sessions it would be fun to experiement a bit more with the gems using layers and transparency

Here are the children showing their images, the school printer was running out of ink so the colours were not what the children expected, I like the more metallic look of the ‘orange’ gem.

It’s interesting that the Ruby also has pink lines from this Liverpool supporter, I’m thinking there should be a redesign of the kit….

I’m still not mastering the Elluminate file saving very well and forgetting to take screenshots so I can’t post up an image of the glorious technicolour triangle quilt the class have made with last week’s triangles….We had a look at it together and revisited the Sierpinski fractal, trying to work out what the rule is for drawing one, this is what I came up with:

Rules for drawing a Sierpinski Triangle free hand:

Take midpoint of each side of equilateral triangle

Connect midpoints with a line

this creates upside down equilateral triangle in the centre of the “mother triangle”

Take each corner and repeat as above

The centre triangle at each iteration always remains undivided.

Everyone tried to make as many iterations from their ‘mother triangle’ as they could. We remembered what Daire (?) said last time about a fractal being the same shape no matter how big or small near or far it is. Here is the dictionary definition:

fractal

ˈfrakt(ə)l/

Mathematics

The class are going to work out a way to superimpose Sierpinski Triangles on top of their multi-coloured quilt. I am looking forward to seeing this.

We then thought about rules for making Random Patterns, we looked at the gem drawing and noticed that in most of the drawings the triangles were more or less the same size, we remembered that we had drawn 26 dots ‘randomly’ on the page and connected them, I wondered what we could do to generate triangles of very different sizes, to escape somehow from the way we control what we normally do (spacing things out across the page)

I showed them a drawing that had lots of little circles on it, the circles came from dropping washers all over the page, then stopping when one fell on the floor, I didn’t look at the page because I didn’t want to influence where the washer might land.

A Recipe for a Random Drawing

one piece of A4 paper

a handful of washers

 a pencil

1. Close eyes

2. Drop washer one by one

3. Keep going till one fall on the ground

4. Mark the places where each washer landed

Each group made up rules for Random drawings and showed me their results….we randomised the drawings further by superimposing rules from other groups on top of the drawings until they became very complex, I would love to get some of these in an email or on the class blog…..We had to remember to connect each dot to  2 others

Ellie noticed this already when she was drawing her gem using the computer – can you remember why it was important to connect all the dots Ellie?

There were some wonderful Random rules using feathers, pencils, blindfolds, dice and noses…I would love to see some of these on the blog too… here is a blurry image of one groups rules:

Our aim is to get as complex and as varied as we can allowing the rule to generate its own drawing.

Food for thought

here is a picture by Paul Klee:

called Rose Garden

It’s an interesting title since the picture is obviously a cityscape…

Roses

City

Gem!!!

The children showed me some lovely pictures thay had made on the computer based on triangles, there was an apple which also looked like a tree growing out of a globe and a fabulous still life with a banana  it would be great to see these on the class blog too !!

STUDIO