Hi,
I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC, Canada) and I am interested in the GSoC program.
I am interested in the exploration of Math through the creation of Digital Art and how this can be used in classrooms and after school clubs to promote interest in Math and develop skills particularly among students in the age range 13 to 18.
I have conducted an after school club with students in which we used Inkscape, Scratch/BYOB and various applets. Some of the results from this club can be seen in my blog: http://visquest.blogspot.ca.
There are several projects that I would be interested in working on. One area is to take a topic such as Tessellations and fill out the tool set as needed to make these projects accessible for young teenagers. There is an excellent web site (http://www.tessellations.org) which describes many techniques for creating tessellations and there is a tutorial for performing the basic steps in Inkscape (http://www.digitalartforall.com/1267/inkscape-creating-tessellations/), together these make a very good starting point. Some of the places where students stumble are 1) Understanding commands such as Path-Division and Path-Union 2) Performing Translation and Rotation so that the pieces line up correctly (need a way to mark an alignment guide on both pieces based on style of tessellation) 3) The Tiling dialog is very complicated and does not support an iterative approach.
Another area is to look at the learning potential for something like the Spirograph extension (or L-System extension or many other extensions) and how it could be improved. For example, there is quite a lot of interesting math to explore with hypertrochoid and epitrochoid curves, however, the current dialog approach does not give the user an intuitive understanding of how the circles move relative to one another. In contrast, the Spiromath applet (http://www.mathplayground.com/Spiromath.html) gives nice visual feedback about the relative motion but is very limited in its drawing capabilities. A fun project would be to turn the Spirograph extension into a tool, extend it to allow for shapes other than circles and give more direct control over things like pen position, number of revolutions (including the ability to rewind if it has gone too far) etc.
I am interested in using Inkscape in my thesis research as a key part of a Mathematical Art environment and would welcome the opportunity to work with a mentor. I am interested in gaining experience developing tools and extending the user interface.
Kind regards, Veronika
-- View this message in context: http://inkscape.13.n6.nabble.com/Mathematical-Art-for-teenagers-tp4632081p46... Sent from the Inkscape - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Hi,
Having read over what you're interested in working on, there is definitely potential for what can be done. As far as tessellations, we've had the functionality in the Tile Clones dialog for some time now, but it could definitely be FAR more usable. Currently you can get great results, http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.41-CVS-linux-tiles1.png (ugh, back when we used CVS) but the amount of work it requires isn't trivial for someone not very familiar with it.
I know that Krzysztof had mentioned the idea of making the Tile Clones feature into a tool rather than in the dialog to improve usability and this sounds like it would be right up your alley. I don't recall if the discussion was on the mailing list or chatting, but I will see if I can dig up any of his thoughts on the subject.
Cheers, Josh
On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 10:19 PM, veronika <vmi@...2827...> wrote:
Hi,
I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC, Canada) and I am interested in the GSoC program.
I am interested in the exploration of Math through the creation of Digital Art and how this can be used in classrooms and after school clubs to promote interest in Math and develop skills particularly among students in the age range 13 to 18.
I have conducted an after school club with students in which we used Inkscape, Scratch/BYOB and various applets. Some of the results from this club can be seen in my blog: http://visquest.blogspot.ca.
There are several projects that I would be interested in working on. One area is to take a topic such as Tessellations and fill out the tool set as needed to make these projects accessible for young teenagers. There is an excellent web site (http://www.tessellations.org) which describes many techniques for creating tessellations and there is a tutorial for performing the basic steps in Inkscape (http://www.digitalartforall.com/1267/inkscape-creating-tessellations/), together these make a very good starting point. Some of the places where students stumble are 1) Understanding commands such as Path-Division and Path-Union 2) Performing Translation and Rotation so that the pieces line up correctly (need a way to mark an alignment guide on both pieces based on style of tessellation) 3) The Tiling dialog is very complicated and does not support an iterative approach.
Another area is to look at the learning potential for something like the Spirograph extension (or L-System extension or many other extensions) and how it could be improved. For example, there is quite a lot of interesting math to explore with hypertrochoid and epitrochoid curves, however, the current dialog approach does not give the user an intuitive understanding of how the circles move relative to one another. In contrast, the Spiromath applet (http://www.mathplayground.com/Spiromath.html) gives nice visual feedback about the relative motion but is very limited in its drawing capabilities. A fun project would be to turn the Spirograph extension into a tool, extend it to allow for shapes other than circles and give more direct control over things like pen position, number of revolutions (including the ability to rewind if it has gone too far) etc.
I am interested in using Inkscape in my thesis research as a key part of a Mathematical Art environment and would welcome the opportunity to work with a mentor. I am interested in gaining experience developing tools and extending the user interface.
Kind regards, Veronika
-- View this message in context: http://inkscape.13.n6.nabble.com/Mathematical-Art-for-teenagers-tp4632081p46... Sent from the Inkscape - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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participants (2)
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Josh Andler -
veronika