Lesson Plans and Teaching Materials
I've heard parents complain "my daughter makes collages from magazine
clippings in her high school geometry class instead of learning real
math". Some of the lesson plans listed here are like that,
but are perhaps appropriate as auxiliary material. The better plans
here teach some real mathematics as the students perform their projects.
I haven't made much attempt to go through the rest of the junkyard
to find appropriate teaching resources that aren't already arranged into
lesson plans; you'd be better off doing it yourself.
- Algorithmic
vectorial geometry,
French geometry e-textbook by J.-P. Jurzak.
- Border
pattern gallery. Oklahoma State U. class project displaying examples
of the seven types of symmetry (frieze groups) possible for
linear patterns in the plane.
- Cinderella
multiplatform Java system for compass-and-straightedge construction,
dynamic geometry demonstrations and
automatic theorem proving.
Ulli Kortenkamp and Jürgen Richter-Gebert, ETH Zurich.
- Escher
in the classroom, Jill Britton.
- Ephraim Fithian's
geometry web page. Teaching activities, test previews, and some
Macintosh game software.
- Geometry and the Imagination in Minneapolis.
Notes from a workshop led by Conway, Doyle, Gilman, and Thurston.
Includes several sections on polyhedra, knots, and symmetry groups.
- Geometry
turned on -- making geometry dynamic. A book on the use of
interactive software in teaching.
- GeoProof interactive
geometry software including automated theorem proving methods.
- High school
buckyball art.
Kerry Stefancyk, Allison Cahill, and Jessica Smith make polyhedral
models out of stained glass.
- Hyperbolic Geometry using Cabri
- Investigating
Patterns: Symmetry and Tessellations.
Companion site to a middle school text by Jill Britton,
with links to many other web sites involving symmetry or tiling.
- Isotiles,
workbook on the shapes that can be formed by combining isosceles
triangles with side lengths in the golden ratio.
- Jacqui's
Polyomino Workshop.
Activities associated with polyominoes, aimed at the level of primary
(or elementary) school mathematics.
- M203 Cabri Page. Wilson Stothers explains the geometry of conic sections
using the Cabri-géomètre dynamic geometry software system.
- Manipula
Math with Java. Interactive applets to help students grasp the
meaning of mathematical ideas.
- Math Made Easy:
Geometry interactive video supplemental learning materials.
- The
Math Professor: Geometry Resources on the Web.
- Measurement
sample. Ed Dickey advocates teaching about sphere packings and
kissing numbers to high school students as part of a
teaching
strategy involving manipulative devices.
- Non-Euclidean games implemented in Shockwave by students in an
advanced high school geometry class:
projective-plane asteroids,
hyperbolic
double-torus minesweeper, and
cubical
fruitarian snake.
- Non-Euclidean
geometry with LOGO. A project at Cardiff, Wales, for using the LOGO
programming language to help mathematics students visualise
non-Euclidean geometry.
- Occurrence of
the conics.
Jill Britton explains how the different conic curves can all be formed
by slicing the same cone at different angles, and finds many examples of
them in technology and nature.
- Origami: a study in symmetry. M. Johnson and B. Beug, Capital H.S.
- PolygonPat
Australian school program involving coloring in geometric patterns in
glazed terracotta.
- Polyhedra
pastimes, links to teaching activities collected by J. Britton.
- Polytopia
CD-ROMs on tessellations, polyhedra, honycombs, and polytopes.
- A teacher's guide to building the icosahedron as a class project
- Virtual Image,
makers of CD-ROMS of ray-traced mathematical animation.
- Wingeom,
freeware Windows geometric construction software.
From the Geometry Junkyard,
computational
and recreational geometry pointers.
Send email if you
know of an appropriate page not listed here.
David Eppstein,
Theory Group,
ICS,
UC Irvine.
Semi-automatically
filtered
from a common source file.