I really enjoyed doing this art project! We chose an art piece by Margaret Kepner, which is based on Ulam's spiral of primes. Pictured to the right is our recreation of her original work. I thought it was really interesting to see numbers represented visually as triangles drawn out in a spiral. The coding was quite a bit of work, and if Kyle hadn't figured out how to do it, we probably would have needed to figure out a different medium to represent this. My job in this was to comment on every line of code what number that triangle represented. It took a long time and was kind of frustrating, but after it was done, it was really cool to notice patterns of where numbers were and I felt like I had a better sense of the artwork.
Choosing how we were going to extend the project was, to me, the most interesting part. We were researching different kinds of numbers and came across Lucky Numbers, which at first I just thought was an interesting type of number, but then we found the connection to the primes and the sieve of Eratosthenes and it was even more interesting and relevant to the piece. We also chose perfect squares as something we could apply to the classroom during a unit on exponents perhaps, this could be a good activity to see numbers represented in a different way. Then we found the similar spirals between the perfect squares and triangular numbers and it was all the more interesting!
This was a really interesting way to see numbers represented in a way you wouldn't often see them. I really enjoyed the process of figuring which triangle represented which number and finding patterns in the artwork.
No comments:
Post a Comment