Flatland: Book and Movie

2. Nick Jackiw and Nathalie Sinclair have developed online scripts where Spacelanders can interactively manipulate Flatlanders to appreciate visualization in Flatland. In groups, experiment with these scripts:

http://www.kcptech.com/dgylconf/proceedings/flatland/flat_triangle1.htm

http://www.kcptech.com/dgylconf/proceedings/flatland/flat_crowdscene.htm

Do these help in visualizing life as a Flatlander?

3. Watch the trailer of the Flatland movie at http://www.flatlandthemovie.com/. Does this help you visualize what life in Flatland would be like?

4. Because the movie was made for Spacelanders, embellishments have been made for our entertainment. Unfortunately, many are geometrically inappropriate. Find several examples of images that appear in the trailer that would not really exist in Flatland.

Flatland Game Movie Activities:

By drawing a sequence of Flatland Game slices on card stock you can make your own “Flatland movie” using a flip book.

1.Draw successive slices on individual pieces of card stock (business-card size works well), leaving some open space on the left (this is where you’ll hold the flip book), aligning the images on consistent locations on each page.

2.Assemble the pictures into a flip book.

3.Holding it on the left, thumb through the individual pictures and you will have a movie of your object passing through Flatland!

Activities for Abbot’s Book Flatland:

1.Read Sections 1 – 3 of Abbott’s Flatland. In small groups talk what life must be like in Flatland. (The full text of Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott is available online at http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/ .)