Quick blog post about a nice site I found today whilst working with some pupils on symmetry – we were finding some of the letters a bit tricky to work out, so I went looking for an online resource that would let us see exactly what we were doing. I  had a quick trawl through a few different sites, but Symmetry Artist suited us best, allowing us to change the axis of symmetry from horizontal to vertical and also to write in the parts of the letters we already had and see what happened. Below you can see us trying out the letter ‘M’!

We try out the letter 'M' with a vertical axis of symmetry

The site lets you selct x-axis or y-axis symmetry, diagonal symmetry (x=y or x=-y), symmetry about the origin or even up to 9-point rotational symmetry. You can choose from a variety of pens (including some exploding dots!), adjust the thickness of the line and choose the colour of the ink, allowing more creative types to be artistic as well as symmetrical. It  also allows you to choose whether to see the line of symmetry, to select either a circle or a square canvas, or to add a grid of dots to help illustrate your points. Very versatile.

The pupils really enjoyed it, and said it was a big help. Worth a look, definitely.