1. Get as long a rope as you can. Tie the pieces up if they are
not long enough.
2. Get twelve students (just to coinside the number with the
lesson plan that you will soon get from Elaine.) to hold the rope at
various places and make a polygon --- each student is a vertex. Ask them
to sit on the floor so everyone can see where the guards stand.
3. Have other students act as guards and the task is to place a
minimum suffisient number of guards at the vertices, or act as point
guards.
4. Vary the shape of the 12-gon until everyone agrees on the
outcome. This could take a good 15 minutes or so of the class time ---
nice for block schedule!
5. Challenge the students with more difficult shapes if it seems
to be too trivial to them --- you should have some shape in mind first.
Move on to other polygons after that (that could take another 15 min. or
so.)
6. If the floor is "below them", have them stand. The guards can
stand on the chairs or desks.
7. Polygons with holes can be done the same way. This should be
more difficult and challenging.
8. This should be fun and valuable in the case of edge-guards of
exceptional situations (Re: Project 1.)
9. A variation of rope and students is the use of strings and
thumbtags or Scotch tapes, but I think the rope is more fun.
Let me know how it goes when you try it with your class.
duncan