This PREP workshop was made possible by the NSF grant DUE: 0341481

From Prep08Wiki

Nancy,

This is very cool. The Kolam drawings are similar to African sand drawings (sona) (see Geometry From Africa, by Paulus Gerdes), and some of the techniques for drawing the curve on a grid is similar to that for drawing Celtic knot patterns (see Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction, by George Bain). It might be interesting to try to combine these, to show how these ideas appear in many, geographically widely disparate, cultures.

I think, before students can draw their own arbitrary Kolam patterns, they need a clear description of the rules for the drawing (are the lines allowed to go through the dots? Can you retrace part of the path?), and it would probably help to have a couple of simpler drawing exercises where they create patterns with some specified symmetry to get the hang of it, before doing their own.

Blake 22:00, 26 June 2008 (UTC)