Math Project - Slope Art

I wanted to share out this project that I have done for 2 years now with great success. For me a project should ideally be: cheap enough that it can be done in any school, effective at teaching content, and encourages learning through the project itself.


The Slope Art project (examples above) meets all three requirements and provides an opportunity for students to learn some programming. Students have a lot of creativity in the designs and the project provides feedback to the student so they can learn and correct their work. The project is called the Slope Art project but it also teaches/reinforces Cartesian graphing, domain and range, slope intercept equation, manipulating variables, etc.

I have used the project in different ways with my 9th graders. Last year I gave them the template and had them write all the code for each line, the second year I had them develop the functions which makes the code a little cleaner but may take a little more time to understand.

This project could also be scaled down and created using string and nails in wood. You just wouldn't get the self-correcting feedback that you do from the Python.

I dedicate this project to Ms. Dairiki who first had me create a hyperbola with straight lines.

Slope Art 1.0 (with each line individually)
Slope Art 2.0 (with functions)

Some resources that helped inspire this:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/89023/
http://www.stringartfun.com/
http://www.mathcats.com/crafts/stringart.html

If you have any questions about the resources, the instructions, or the Python code let me know. I hope your students learn as much as mine do through this project. Enjoy!

Update: VPython (required for the Slope Art Project) now works with Python 3.0 so unless you have reasons to do so, I would highly recommend using Python 3.0.