Right Angles Are Everywhere: A PhotoStory

I have been putting together a display of photographs, collected during our plenary session in maths today. We introduced right angles during the session, and having made their right angle measurers, the students were set the challenge of finding as many examples as possible, and recording them as labeled drawings. At the end of the session the students excitedly fed back on the objects they had found, and armed with my digital camera I set about photographing these as they told me what they had discovered. On reflection it might have also been interesting to let them have access to the Digi Blues, so they could capture their right angles as they found them.

Bringing the images home I wondered how I might highlight the features they had found for display. The images used in the photostory below, have been very simply edited in order to achieve this. I used Photofiltre, the open source graphics editor I have mentioned in previous posts to do this.



In some images, where the orientation was OK, the right angles have been marked with squares, the standard method used to denote them. While in others I have used a circle, with the fill transparency increased to give a spotlight type effect, around or over the angles.

To do this in photofiltre, you use the select tool, drag your shape over the area you want to place it and then from the edit menu, select "stroke and fill." From the dialogue box that appears you can then select the stroke or fill colours you want to use, alter the thickness of the stroke, and change the opacity of the fill too.

Later in the week we will be looking more closely at the properties of quadrilaterals, and thinking about shapes we can see in everyday objects. Perhaps here I could let the students loose with the digi blues and send them off on themed shape hunts. It might be interesting to see what they return with, if asked to photograph examples of particular groups of 2 and 3 d shapes?