Day 5

Web II and Explorations in Sketchpad

The day began in a scattered manner. A couple of the groups were up bright and early, plugging away at their group projects in the computer room. When I arrived at the lab, I encountered a busily surfing group. I was only in attendance for part of the day, so below I include Sarah Seastone's account of the remainder of the day.

Sarah
Annie posted two problems, one a geometry problem and one a Sketchpad exercise. For the first, participants were to construct the angle bisectors of various quadrilaterals (a parallelogram, a rhombus, a trapezoid, an isosceles trapezoid, a kite, etc.) and determine what figure results in each case; Annie pointed out that the figure formed by the angle bisectors of the four angles of a rectangle is a square and invited the group to investigate further. A good time was had by people learning to use Sketchpad to illustrate the various figures and forming conjectures about them.

The second problem had two parts: 1) construct a rectangle whose area remains constant while its perimeter changes--several people solved this; 2) construct a rectangle whose perimeter remains constant while its area changes. People continued to puzzle about these back at the house while waiting for a delicious Boston Chicken dinner, and Pat eventually solved the second problem, with the help of Steve and Annie and others who watched over her shoulder and cheered her on. This problem was particularly good as an exercise in understanding how constructing figures and constraining their elements works in Sketchpad.

Before we got there in the morning people told me that those who went to the lab focused in on what they were doing in working on their group projects. The comment I heard was that everybody was VERY quiet, so much so that new people coming in were surprised by how hard everybody was concentrating.

Good discussions went on during and after dinner; I heard one about the graphing calculator. Ruth Carver teaches workshops on the graphing calculator and has been able to trade with and offer information to others in the group. People are finding each other's strengths and taking advantage of the opportunity to talk about common interests and enthusiasms. Everybody seems to have something interesting to offer.

I'll be back again tomorrow with another report o' the day :) Also, if anyone is interested, the Summer94 html pages are under way for the web. If you would like to check them out (though they are still in progress), here is the address again. The institute participants' pictures will be appearing soon.

URL = http://forum.swarthmore.edu/sum94/sum94.html

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Heather Mateyak / July 12, 1994