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Message 1

Quick note: Loved your pages on tessellation, even though I am not a teacher, nor do I have HyperStudio. Very exciting stuff!

John Graham

(... wrote Suzanne:)

John,

Thank you for your quick note! Funny thing but today we just put up the first version of a comments page. We would love a comment by a non-teacher, non-HyperStudio owner....what brought you to the tessellation page? What caught your eye?

Message 2

Hi! It's nice that you replied.

What caught my eye? Well it's a bit of a longish story....

I am a computer science student in Canada and I am working on a game for a project. The game is supposed to involve bombs and explosions, yuck! Enough of that around. So, I was in Ottawa and I happened to see an M.C. Escher exhibition that contained every single Escher I had ever seen or read about. Amazing. After returning the notions of tiles, shifts and tessellations were floating around my brain and I thought: "why not make a game board from tessellations rather than bombs?"

I was feeling discouraged (my artistic skills...you know) and was about to abandon the idea as too difficult when I finally did a Web search for tessellations. Your pages were prominent amongst the returned URLs. But the single factor that drew me to your site was the fact that it involved kids. I saw the word school and thought "if they can do it, maybe I can too." And so I looked around and even though I do not use HyperStudio, nor am I a teacher, I looked at your demonstrations about tessellations and Whammo! It hit me. I can do this stuff. And it looks incredibly fun too! Would I have loved to do that stuff in grade 5!

The instructions were clear and very intuitive (a big plus for me) and overall it guided me in the right direction. Wonderful! To be honest though...I didn't look at the "Where's the Math?" section because I am studying so much math right now, I'd rather look at the lovely pictures.

Thanks again,

John Scott Graham
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada