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Size: 194 KB
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Title: How to Draw a Star
Book Description: How do you draw a star?
The star.imt mathwright book provides opportunities to explore the geometry of stars. There are three activities pages. On the first you can explore the relationship between the number of points in a star and the size of the angle formed at each point. The second allows you to construct stars by drawing polygons with vertices regularly spaced around a circle. The third automates this process according to a user defined pattern for drawing the sides of the polygon.
Specific suggestions for using each page are included in the accompanying User's Guide, Star.doc. One method is to draw a line, then make an angle and draw a second line, then make another angle of the same size, and another line, and so on. But how big should the angles be? The answer is 36 degrees for a five pointed star. That is, if you keep drawing equal lines, and keep making 36 degree angles, after five lines you return to the starting point, making a star.
There are stars with many different numbers of points (more than 5). Each point will have the same angle, but the size of the angle depends on the number of points. On the next page, you can experiment with different angles and different numbers of points to try and construct stars. See if you can find a pattern that determines which angles form stars with a given number of points.
Author: Dan Kalman and Angela Hare
Suggested Use: This is an animated illustration of some interesting aspects of drawing a simple star (without lifting your pen from the paper). It is a WorkBook in which you will "learn as you play." It poses some interesting questions, some easy, and some difficult, and offers many opportunities to experiment and to test your guesses.
Topics: geometry, logo graphics, line drawings
Number of Pages: 5
Animation: Yes
Grade
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