The goal of this interactive activity is to make a sort of fractal, by starting with a colored grid and replacing each colored tile with a set of smaller tiles to see what design is produced.
To begin, how many colors would you like to use? The colors will be grey scale, going from black to white.
Awesome! The next step is to figure out how the image will iterate. This means that for each color you have chosen, you must chose a square matrix full of smaller colors that will replace the original color when the image iterates.
For example, you could have:
2 1
1 ->
1 2
Which means that when you go to the next iteration of the image, the color represented by 1 is replace by the four colors as shown above. Since you have colors, you will have to do this times.
The table below will help you. The square represents the color, and the number will represent the color when choosing the pattern.
Color
Number
First you will input the pattern for the color above 1, then above 2, and so on until you have reached how ever many colors.
To input the pattern, type in the numbers for the first row, followed by a comma, followed by the numbers for the second row, etc.
So for the example above, you would type in 21,12 into the input below.
Alternative, enter a single number to have the computer generate an n by n random pattern for that color instead.
Currently submitting pattern for color number
Cool! The last step is to set up the starting grid before iteration. To do this, it's like filling in the pattern in the previous step.
For example, to input a 3x3 starting block with 5 colors, a valid input could be 531,242,335.
Put the whole thing the text box, separating rows with commas.
The box below shows the current iteration of the pattern. Click the next step button to see the next step of your design.