News

It was a bottom drawer find. You know, that part of the filing cabinet where you put things to use later ... then when later comes you forget you have it ... then later still you rediscover it when you are looking for something else. In this case it was an envelope postmarked 1998 in the Task Centre drawer, from Andy Martin in England. In 1998 the Task Centre Project had been running for six years. The envelope was full of reports from Andy's Year 8 students on the shapes they had made stimulated by what is now Task 168, Mirror Patterns 3. In fact, it was this class's work that led to the addition of the task to our collection in 1999. The student work is startling stuff. Too much to publish it all, so we have made a selection of three students' work and added a challenge from the student who claims to have made the most. The result is a fascinating From The Classroom link that could be a talking point at your next faculty meeting. See Link List below.

In the same drawer was the beginnings of an Investigation Guide to extend Task 3, Doug's Tablecloth. See Link List below. The task involves folding a piece of cloth to fit in a drawer, the focus being to actually get it into the d...n drawer!

Several extensions are suggested in the cameo, but this new Investigation Guide (so new that the key elements of it were written in 1993!) shifts the focus. Using paper, it uncovers patterns that develop when the number of folds is connected to either the number of parts, or the number of creases. Then it asks, what happens if we change the way the paper is folded.