Monday, May 15, 2017

Another visualization task

Here is another interesting setup, shared in Tom Steinke's OAME 2017 session.  I have seen circles around squares and circles inside squares, but not circles and squares sharing a baseline.

I think a student could do a lot of productive reasoning about what the situation would look like prior to using the interactive sketch.


  1. What does the rectangle look like at the extremes?
  2. Will the side be greater than or less than the diameter?
  3. What fraction of the side length of  the square do you think the diameter will be?
Opening the sketch and dragging the point, without showing the measurements, is interesting.  How close is a student's guess about where the position of the drag point must be for the rectangle to be a square?  How close is there estimation of the relationship between the square's side and the diameter?

Lastly, they could choose an arbitrary diameter, like 100, and see if they can verify the result. Surprisingly, everything comes out nice and evenly with narry a square root of two in sight!

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