TileLand is a tiling environment that is designed to aid in creating tiling patterns. The patterns are described by a sequence of polygon actions, programs, that are constructed either by using the graphical labeled buttons such as "square", "red", and "turn" or by using the button's corresponding keyboard shortcuts; for instance, "square" is the key "4", "red" is the key "r", and "turn" is key "t". The keyboard shortcuts are indicated by the either the capitalized letter in the labels of the buttons or, in the case of the polygons, the number of sides. Constructed patterns can be compared to the displayed "challenges" by pressing and holding the "?" button.

In addition, the programs can be manipulated and edited with the aid of a cursor that appears as a thick horizontal line. The selections of a section of the program can be cut, copied, and pasted. The selections can be made one of three ways. The first way is to highlight a section of the program by dragging the mouse over the desired actions. The second way is to use the the arrow keys: the up and down arrows are used to position the cursor, the beginning of a selection, and the right and left keys are used to increase and decrease the size of the selection. The third way is to drag the mouse between two tiles in the pattern; this implicitly selects the actions of the program which take the one tile to the other.

Some ideas about tiling are ilustrated and can be viewed and examined with the methods used above. The examples are rough but they allow for navigation of the code.

To start a tiling from scratch--press reset and press the following sequence of buttons: "square" "blue" "turn" "square" "blue". Watch the movement of emphasized edge of the outlined polygon during the sequence of clicks.

The examples 1 to 15 are provided to indicate a number of directions for educators. They are not meant as introductory examples for students. The challenges in the lower left corner are more meant as a example of a slower progression (with the exception of the last two). TileLand is meant to be run as an application--see Java Problem page to see how to install it. I welcome any feedback about TileLand.

Here are the related publications so far.

Sedig, K., Morey, J., & Chu, B. (2002). TileLand: A Microworld for Creating Mathematical Art. Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 2002: World Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, Denver, USA, July 2002.

If you have browser problems, look at the Java Problems? page.

A 3DLattice Viewer		PolygonRnD

5 TileLand