Recognise and Describe Transformations

In this activity, we will recognise and describe different transformations!

The three transformations we will look at are reflections, rotations and translations.

Each one looks different and that makes them easy to recognise.

Let's look at each one - you can make notes here to help you describe them!

Reflections

Easy to recognise because the shape will be facing the opposite way (flipped).

To describe it we have to say what the equation of the mirror line is.

Look at this one!

We would say:

It is a reflection in the line y = 1

Rotations

A bit more tricky!

The shape will have been turned!

To describe it we need:

-  The centre of rotation: this is the point from which we rotate the shape.

-  The direction: clockwise or anticlockwise.

-  The number of degrees it is rotated: the most common ones are 90^o, 180^o and 270^o

Look at this one!

We would say:

It is a rotation 180° around the point (3, 2)

Note when the rotation is 180° we do not need to say clockwise or anticlockwise as they both get to the same place.

Translation

Easy to recognise because the shape will be facing the same way!

To describe it we have to say the movement in a vector.

The x movement (across) on top.

The y movement (up and down) on the bottom.

Look at this one!

We would say:

It is a translation by the vector:

Note this means 4 moves to the right and 2 moves up. 

If the move was left we would write -4 and if the move was down we would write -2.         

Let's look at some questions to see if we can recognise the different transformations and if we can describe them.