Martin Hotham’s spirals

Saw a great tweet from Martin Hotham last night:

I thought it would be fun to let the boys play around with this activity. We’ve actually talked about spirals before a little. First with our Zome set:

Fibonacci Spirals and pentagons with our Zometool set

Then with Anna Weltman’s “loop-de-loops”

Anna Weltman’s Loop-de-loops

and Weltman’s project spiraled us into some of Frank Farris’s work:

Extending Anna Weltman’s loop-de-loops with Frank Farris’s “Creating Symmetry”

The difficulty with the math behind the spirals is that it’ll be a few years before either of the boys encounters trigonometry. However, Hotham’s Desmos programs are so stunning and so easy to use that I’m fine just letting the boys play with them.

My younger son played around for 5 minutes – here’s what he had to say:

Next I let my older son play around – here’s what he had to say when he was done:

We’ve played around with one of Hotham’s creations before – when he created a program based on Ann-Marie Ison’s art:

Extending our project with Ann-Marie Ison’s art”

I love his work and per the law “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” I can only assume that he’s some wort of wizard. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with next!

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