Activity Description Determine the fractal dimensions of several line-deformation fractals. Input the scale factor and number of similar copies, and the dimension will be calculated. Fractal Dimensions is one of the Interactivate assessment explorers.

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Fractal Dimensions

Place in mathematics curriculum:

• practice students' geometry skills
• practice students' logarithm skills (optional)
• illustrate the definition of fractal dimension
• demonstrate fractal objects

This activity allows the user to calculate the fractal dimension of a series of regular fractals without access to a calculator. It is not necessary to understand logarithms to use this activity. This activity would work well in same ability groups of two to four for about thirty-five minutes if you use the exploration questions and ten to fifteen minutes otherwise.

Preparations for this activity:

• give implicit directions on what they are to do. For example, "Today we are going to fill out the table on the worksheet and see if we can ..."
• answer the question "How is dimension calculated?"
• discuss logarithms and exponents