Friday Fave: Transformations Activities

Hey ho! Friday Fave here with new activities and some activity updates!

Here’s what’s new.

First up, two activities that are inspired by and adapted from Illustrative Mathematics and OpenUp Resources. (You can view and download for free at openupresources.org.)

Shifting Shapes elicits informal language about how shapes move in the plane, and it includes a delightful Kaleidoscope Playground.

Animation of an activity screen on which you draw in a Kaleidoscope Playground and are asked to figure out how each of four different kaleidoscopes work, e.g. by translation, rotation, reflection, or dilation

Polygraph: Rigid Transformations puts that informal language to use, and gives teachers opportunities to refine and formalize that language in the service of precise, clear communication.

Next up, a new version of Transformation Golf, and an updated interface.

Transformation Golf: Non-Rigid Motion expands the repertoire of transformations to include dilation. Now you can stretch and shrink your hexagon into place in addition to spinning, sliding, and turning.

In related news, we have updated the underlying technology for Transformation Golf, including better styling for the pre-image and image, and improved controls for specifying your transformations. You’ll see these improvements in the previously released Transformation Golf: Rigid Motion.

Animation of a solution to a Transformation Golf challenge, which involves specifying a rotation by its center and angle, and specifying two translations by distance and direction, in order to match an L-shaped hexagon with another L-shaped hexagon.