Kites & Geometry

617 Words3 Pages
What is geometry? Geometry is the study of many things including shapes, angles, lines, & consructions, and it plays a huge role when you are building something. Look around, geometry is everywhere. The buildings, the sidewalk, even your bed involve geometry. In Ancient Greece, they did not have the technology we have today. The main tools they had was just a straightedge and a compass. Yet they still figured out how to build pretty much anything. Even a simple object, such as a kite, requires geometry. You must carefully choose a shape and size that will have the best chance of flying. You can learn a lot about geometry just by building one yourself, like I did. A kite is a quadrilateral with 2 pairs of congruent sides that are adjacent to eachother. Also, kites contain perpendicular diagonals, meaning that if you connect both ends to their opposites, you will get 4 right angles at the point where both lines intersect. After connecting both corners to their opposite, you get 4 right triangles. That’s a lot of geometry right there. Kites can teach a lot more than you think . When I built my kite, I made it into a diamond, where the bottom 2 sides were longer than the top 2 sides. It was in the design of a baseball field, not too big but not too small either. Even though I put a lot of effort into it, I felt it wouldn’t even fly. The materials in my kite weren’t too special. For the baseball field design, I used normal paper to draw my baseball field on. On the back part of my kite, I used the plastic from a garbage bag, hoping it will fly with that. For support, I used wooden sticks that went across from vertex to vertex. I decided these materials would work best because they seemed the lightest. I thought the wind would hit the plastic in a way that it pushed the kite up. The paper and plastic seemed like a perfect, weightless combination to use. If

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