14 February 2008 - Valentine's Day

After technical difficulties (both major photocopiers were broken at school), we began with a project of art enlargement.  This project is in the MathCounts Club activity book.  We used the Wildcats logo from the Nashua Catholic website.  Here is the Enlargement Image with Grid.  In this project, students draw each square of the artwork on a new square proportionately larger.  When completed, the tiles are assembled to create an  enlarged image of the original.  The students were only able to complete 10 of the 16 squares during our meeting time.

We talked about Linear Transformations of scaling, rotating, translating, and reflections.  Definitions for congruent objects, similar objects, and proportional objects were given.

The proportions of Egyptian art were discussed.  We learned that the Egyptians had a specific set of proportions for their images of human figures.  The head is 1/7 times the body height. 

The Golden Ratio proportion of Greek and Renaissance art was discussed.  We learned that the Greek's used a head to body height ratio of (1-0.618 )-squared.  Thus a head on a Greek statue is about 0.146 times the body height.  This isn't that different from Egypt's 1/7 = 0.143.

Finally, we talked about proportions in American icons, specifically the Barbie® Doll manufactured by Mattel.  Her head is 1.5" and her body is 12".  Her head is 1/8 the height of her body.  We also measured Barbie's body parts and scaled them to an average adult female.  We compared the scaled measurements to measurements of a typical woman.

Students were given copies of the MATHCOUNTS Proportional Reasoning Stretch and the MATHCOUNTS Valentine's Day Problem Set.