With nothing but a compass, students can construct a lovely daisy design consisting of seven interlocking circles, all of the same size.

I was delighted to see that the U.S. postal service chose to feature four variations of this design in their floral geometry stamps shown below. And Michael Serra’s textbook, Discovering Geometry, presents even more designs that are offshoots of the daisy construction.

The Web Sketchpad model below (and here), challenges students to reproduce six designs based on the daisy construction. The designs deliberately omit some of the circles needed to build them so as to increase the challenge. When students have built all six, they can then construct their own designs by using pages 7-10 of the websketch.

This short video provides an overview of the two Web Sketchpad tools used for the construction.