When I left the project yesterday I was pretty sure that I had a clear picture of what I needed to do. All I had to figure out was how to populate the figure across the page. I was working with the program that I had created, and I was looking for a simpler way to figure out the positions of the figures on the xy axis of the field.

Cynthia Soloman stopped to see how it was all going. I showed off my progress and told her what I was up to. “Wouldn’t it be easier if you started your figure at a point of symmetry?”

Duh.

So, back to the blank page. Fortunately I knew how to make the shape now, I just needed to start in a different place of the figure. She also showed me how I could fill in the figures. So I set about reflecting and repeating the shape across the field.

After spending three days looking at the geometry of this problem from the outside in (circles and inscribed squares first), from repetition of form, from the basic shape, and now from a point of symmetry, it was surprisingly easy to fill the page with the figure. it’s not perfect. The program is still more brute force than elegant computation, but it works (pretty much). So with a little code assist from my table mate, I even changed the background color.

and the original tile pattern from the Alhambra in Granada, Spain –

What did I learn? Lots of stuff, but I remembered that I don’t really have teacher ADD; I can focus when the work is intriguing.