Geometry is one of our favorite mathematics subjects. The goal of all White Crane Education mathematics series is to teach mathematics through its connections to the real world. Geometry, with its foundations in the ancient Egyptian's need to resurvey the banks of the Nile after its yearly floods, is so attached to the real world that it would be hard not to teach it this way.
The White Crane Education geometry curriculum has six parts: a textbook, a companion parent/teacher's volume, two specialty texts, an online reference and an electronic classroom.
The Core Curriculum
Essential Geometry covers all of the fundamentals of Euclidean geometry. Each chapter has multiple short applications and concludes with a detailed, hands-on application from fields as diverse as surveying, tiling and celestial navigation.Essential Geometry - The Parent's Guide is the companion text to Essential Geometry. It includes additional historical material, discussion points, brief applications throughout individual sections and complete answers to all the student text's exercises.Supplemental Texts
Special Topics in Geometry, available in late summer 2005, takes Essential Geometry to the next level. It looks at most of the core textbooks applications in greater detail and expands into whole new areas, some as old as geometry itself (e.g. Euclidean constructions) and others that have taken off as recently as the last several decades (e.g. fractal geometry). This book continues the application oriented approach of Essential Geometry but includes theoretical material as well.
Geometric Constructions covers the thirty-six constructions from Euclid's elements and modern inventions like the "rusty compass" constructions and origami constructions.Free Resources
The Online Geometry Reference is a free reference, fully indexed on our search page, that covers all of the material in the standard geometry class with pictures and examples.
Graph theory is a branch of geometry that studies the ways that points can be connected. Almost any real world situation that can be drawn as a set of objects that are somehow connected can be described using graph theory. This includes areas as diverse as transportation (cities connected by roads) and computer networks (computers connected by cables). Our Graph Theory Classroom is a free resource that covers the basic concepts of graph theory. The lessons include exercises, Java applets that illustrate the concepts and real-world applications.
The Java applets used in all of our classrooms are based on a collection of Java classes that implement geometric concepts such as lines and circles. We've decided to release these core classes under the General Public License (GPL) and have made them available in our source code area. The documentation is available in the standard Javadoc format in our reference section.