Free open educational resources from the University of Edinburgh to download and adapt for primary and secondary teaching.
Winner of the 2021 OEGlobal Awards for Excellence Open Curation Award for this collection of high quality student made OER on the TES platform.
Free open educational resources from the University of Edinburgh to download and adapt for primary and secondary teaching.
Winner of the 2021 OEGlobal Awards for Excellence Open Curation Award for this collection of high quality student made OER on the TES platform.
This resource provides materials to run a workshop about Escher’s printmaking, exploring the artist, his process and the mathematics underlying his work. There is a practical art element which involves participants designing and printing their own piece of work.
This resource aims to show participants a creative side to mathematics. Knowledge of symmetry (rotational and reflectional) is assumed but also explained within the resource. The workshop is aimed at general public level - it is suitable for anyone with a basic understanding of geometry and symmetry.
Learning outcomes: MTH 3-19a, MTH 4-19a, EXA 4-02a, EXA 4-06a
To learn about the life and work of Escher
To understand how mathematics influenced Escher’s work
To learn about symmetries and wallpaper patterns
To be able to identify the wallpaper group of a tessellation design
To learn how to make lino prints
In this resource:
Workshop plan
Part 1: Presentation
Part 2: Designing a tessellating pattern
Part 3: Printmaking
Part 4: The mathematics behind your work
Presentation slides
Part 1: Who was Escher?
Part 2: Regular divisions of the plane
Part 3: Escher and mathematics
Presentation guide
Presentation content
This resource was created as part of the Festival of Creative Learning by the Maths Outreach Team with the School of Mathematics.
Author: Mairi Walker, Ana McKellar, Lukas Cerny and Benedetta Mussati.
Except where otherwise stated, all content is released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
Cover image is a photograph from the original workshop courtesy of the University of Edinburgh School of Mathematics.