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I’ve been meaning to share this project idea with Josh Burker, author of The Invent to Learn: Guide to Fun and the Invent to Learn: Guide to More Fun books, for more than a year.
While on one of the fabulous London Walks tours (I’ve done dozens of them) of Chelsea in London last year, I learned that before houses had street numbers assigned to them, people shared cards with a rendering of their home’s fanlight depicted on it. This practice dates back to 1720.
The function of the fanlight is to light a home’s entry way, but many of London’s upscale townhouses feature a semicircle shaped fanlight in which a geometric pattern exists. Each pattern needs to be different, at least in a particular neighborhood, in order to depict the occupants of the home for deliveries and visitors. Below are some of the photos of fanlights I took while walking around Chelsea.
Here’s the project idea…
- Use your favorite dialect of Logo (Turtle Art, SNAP!, Scratch, etc…) to design a unique fan light. Teachers may support the activity by providing the code for drawing a uniform semicircle in which each student’s fanlight pattern must fit.
Extension
This is a good project for employing the concept of state transparency; in programming as in life, it is a good idea to return to where you started. Returning the turtle to its initial starting position and orientation allows you to repeat the pattern elsewhere on the screen and perform various transformations on it.
Try these challenges
- Use Logo/MicroWorlds/SNAP!/Scratch to program the turtle to draw a row of townhomes with different fan lights in each window.
- Change the scale of your entire neighborhood.
- Change the scale of your fanlight window without altering its shape.
- Allow the user to specify the scale of the fanlight and draw it to that scale.
- Create a more abstract illustration using your fanlight in different ways.
That’s it!
Happy programming
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Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.