Xochicalco, Morelos
by: Jose Rivera, 6th grade
This article was originally published by ISTE's Journal: Logo Exchange, Vol 17, No. 1. Fall 1998.
El Castillo
by Orlando Mihich
This school year my sixth-grade students worked on several Logo
projects. One was the building of the famous Maya pyramid, El
Castillo, at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico, using nothing but
rectangle shapes.
The idea of drawing Mayan pyramids began about two years ago when my
students and I followed the MayaQuest expedition in Central America.
It was a great experience for us to read the daily reports, and meet
all those people along the Ruta Maya. Unfortunately, the expedition
has been abruptly terminated this year, but the rich diaries,
interviews, and events are still online for students to explore. It
was then that one of my students made a drawing of a pyramid. and it
was an inspiration for other students to draw additional
pyramids.
I photocopied a blueprint of the pyramid with some dimensions in
turtle steps. Students had to do some math to figure out additional
values themselves and to invent some solutions.
Students had a lot of fun creating the 54 steps of the frontal
staircase with the repeat function, and even more fun using the
recursive procedure to build the sides of the pyramid. They proved
very creative in reversing some of the procedures, or creating new
ones (e.g. left.rectangle). At the end of the projects, some students
used code to paint their pyramids, others followed, and very few used
the MicroWorlds paint tools. “It was too easy,” they said.
In addition, some students created the three Mayan glyphs for pa, ka,
and la, which stand for the name of the Mayan king Pakal.
Next year I plan to expand the project by adding some more Logo
pyramids from the splendid Maya civilization, other ancient sites
like Palenque, Copan, and Tikal, “the place where the count of
days was kept.” We hope to create a Logo Mayan calculator as an
approach to the mathematics of the Maya.
Basically, this is an old dream. Years ago I traveled extensively
throughout the Maya world, intrigued by the mystery and beauty of
these ancient sites. After this year’s encounter with the Logo
pyramid, my students will definitely recall the name Chichen Itza,
pronounced in class so many times. I hope, as time goes by, they also
remember some of the words of Ms. Linda Schele stressing that,
“American history does not begin in 1492 with Christopher
Columbus, it begins with the first Maya king who wrote his name on
the stone, in 200 BC.”
You will find the pyramid interactive drawing and the code, by Charlie Lu, at the William Patterson University Department of Mathematics' Logo Site.
Xochicalco, Morelos
by: Jose Rivera, 6th grade