I enjoyed looking around in your TESSELLATION TUTORIAL,
www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/tessellate_this/eng/Introduction/default.htm
If you, teachers, use this learning resource, I'd like to encourage you to post the students' work online in three places:
1)
I run an entirely kid-safe website called TESSELLATIONS.ORG which has a medium-sized gallery of 9 middle school maths classes' art. All those classes are in the USA, as are most of the 8,000+ visitors my site receives every day.
I'm hoping to expand that participation to other areas of the world. The site's original webmaster, now deceased, was from the U.K. and I'm sure it irked him, as it does me, that the site isn't more used by the English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, and so on.</p>
Every class's gallery has a main intro page that describes the school or class, with links back to the participating school or the teacher's blog, or both. Kids' identities are generally protected by using only a first name, or initials, or a first name + initial.
Students have the opportunity to write a brief intro to their tessellation work. These intros including notes on inspiration, difficulty level, method, or just a silly story associated with the theme.
2)
I'd also like to encourage teachers of math and art to ask their students to go out and photograph tessellations in the world around them, as a fun homework assignment as they ease into the tessellation portion of their curriculae. If you DO photograph an interesting tessellation-- cracked mud, a dragonfly's wing, a stack of milk cartons, a supermarket's linoleum floor-- please consider posting it in the small "All Around Us" gallery of Tessellations.org.
3)Additionally, you may want to send your students' tessellations to the free online contest at www.worldofescher.com/contest
This contest runs every six months. It generally focuses on child artists though some adults do enter.
The process has three stages:
1) the teacher or the student emails the art (100kb or less, jpeg preferred) to worldofescher.com.
2) the webmaster of W.O.E. chooses the best (usually 40 or 50 of the 300+ entries) to post in an online gallery. The online gallery is voted upon by the public, which usually takes the artists' age into account when voting....so an 11 year old with talent has just as much chance of winning than an adult who's developed that talent in keeping with his age.
3) the three top winners receive a small gift certificate usable in W.O.E.'s online store which sells Escher-related sells, puzzles, books, neckties, and so on. Those winners' art goes into a permanent online "hall of fame" gallery.
I, for one, spent my childhood school time unencouraged to look beyond the school's walls. I feel I missed out on a grand thing, and when I left school I was a bit unprepared to participate in the world. Teachers, don't let your students follow this route. Show them that they can make their mark on the world outside the school, with contests and online galleries, community activities, articles about them in newspapers, and so on.
Sethness
Tessellations.org