Numberverse by Andrew Day

Author:Andrew Day [Andrew Day]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845908980
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2014-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Or

Say Here are some instructions for drawing arches. Can you match the instructions to the pictures? Can you draw the arches by following the instructions?

Or

Say You have a sheet with some arches shown on it. Your sheet is different from the other groups’ sheets. Write instructions for how to draw one of your arches and give the instructions to another group, who will then use the instructions to draw the arch you have in mind.

Theoretically, it would be a good idea to do one on the board first, although whether you could get hold of a compass that can hold a board marker, I don’t know. Perhaps with a normal compass and a heavy pencil on a flip chart you would be OK. Probably best not to attempt drawing it on an interactive whiteboard. If you’re anything like me, you’ll end up with a scrawl that looks like the signature of an illiterate seventeenth-century peasant signing a confession after torture.

If you wanted to take this more into art territory, you could get children to design the front (or ‘facade’) of a building by choosing shapes for the windows and doors. Show them plenty of pictures first to fire them up. Then give them an outline on paper as a starting point. This task brings the added difficulty of arranging the windows at equal intervals along the wall and getting the door right in the middle. That is, if they want it to be symmetrical – most facades are, and before the nineteenth century it was really only incomplete or botched buildings that were asymmetrical. After that they became more fashionable. Still, it is an interesting choice for the designer.

This session also makes a nice lead-in to trips to historical buildings or to the study of certain historical periods (especially the Greeks and Tudors). Once you have been shown how to identify architectural styles, it is relatively easy to do. For example, children aged 3 or 4 can identify something they have never seen before as a church or a mosque as long as it is built in a familiar style.

As this is an engineering concept, there is obviously a science element to be explored. So, in theory, it would be great to test the stability of the different arches by building some and seeing which ones produce the most stable structures. However, to build an arch, you would have to shape each block precisely, with the outer edge being longer than the inner edge. Or you could look at how objects behave under tension and compression – and some of the class may enjoy breaking things in the interest of learning.

1 See also Peter Worley, ‘Il Duomo’, in Once Upon An If (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 151–155.

2 Solid objects are stronger under compression (squashed) than tension (bent apart). For example, if you snap a stick, the side that breaks first is the one being stretched, not the one being crushed.

3 See <http://www.robinsonlibrary.com

/technology/building/details/arches.htm>.

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