Unit Circle: Dia de los Muertos Kite Project
- Google Docs™
Description
Check out all the pages of this project on my website.
The goal of this project is for students to construct their own Unit Circle. They also begin to use it to evaluate exact values of sine and cosine and graph these functions. Can be printed or typed on.
Text of the first page:
Dia de los Muertos Kite Project
ON NOVEMBER 1ST OF EVERY year the people of both
Santiago Sacatepéquez, and Sumpango, Guatemala, put together giant kites to fly during the
Day of the Dead during the All Saints Day Kite Festival.
The vibrantly colored designs on the kites, made of cloth and paper with bamboo frames, depict religious or folkloric themes and they are flown in the nearby Sacatepéquez cemetery to honor the dead. The locals in this small municipality dress up in colorful clothing and head to the cemetery to spend the day cleaning up the graves and decorating them with flowers while they have picnics right next to their departed family members.
Traditionally, the building of the kites takes 40 days, the first day marked by the village’s unmarried men heading out to the coast at 4:00 am to laboriously collect bamboo for the kite frames. Every part of the kite is made using nature’s bounty; the glue is a mixture of yucca flower, lemon peel, and water, ropes are made of the maguey plant, and the tails are made from woven cloth.
The practice of flying colorful kites during the Day of the Dead celebrations has been around for 3,000 years and is recognized by various religious sects, and locals believe it is a tool for communicating with the beyond.
Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/all-saints-day-kite-festival
So what is the math here?
As you can see in the pictures above, the foundation for many of these kites is a circle that has been segmented into either 12 or 8 equal parts (10 is also common, but unrelated to the math we will need). The angles involved in these kites directly connect to those we will use in our study of the Unit Circle. The colored paper needed to decorate the kites will help us make sense of the coordinates.
The Unit Circle is a reference tool used to illustrate ratios of side lengths of special right triangles. There are many applications of the Unit Circle both for precalculus and more advanced math courses.
