Saturday, I enjoyed adapting a heart design to drawing by ruler and to plotting in Grapher. The pattern was quite complicated, and I need to find less challenging ones to scaffold beginners. So, I spent Sunday experimenting in my captain idea log. I noticed that curve stitching a right angle forms a curve called a parabola that is perfect for the lobe of the heart. Then, I extracted the inner section from the pinbroidery design and developed a less difficult heart. Below you can see how the heart is embedded in a triangle.
Because I embedded this heart into a triangle, I used the more traditional Cartesian coordinate system (the grid with the x-axis and the y-axis that you might have purged from your brain as useless) to set up an image in Grapher. If you are having a hard time imagining WHAT that looks like, below are two images for you to compare.
I keep wondering to myself. If a child enjoys drawing such designs in elementary school and learns how to design and graph them in either the Cartesian or polar coordinate system in middle school, might not high school math be less intimidating? Interesting idea to ponder. Here is a PDF for you to try and download. ♡
myheartdesign.pdf |