Last school year, I can confidently say that many of my students enjoyed this one lab exercise we did in class. The exercise was to create circular designs using lines with C++. It may sound weird to find students enjoying a combination of programming and trigonometry to create digital math art but it did happen. When I uploaded their submissions in Facebook, I got a couple of private messages from former students complaining why they didn’t have those. And there were a few who even got curious enough to ask me to teach them. Unfortunately, the exercise was a cumulative effort from different activities and I couldn’t teach it in just one sitting. Since then, I put “Mandala Design by Programming” as one of my to-do video lectures.

And here it is…

The CPNG header and source files can be downloaded here. The PNG encoder could be acquired here. Make sure to get the lodepng.cpp and lodepng.h.

In the video, I used XCode to compile. In case you’re compiling by terminal, include the following flags: -ansi -pedantic -Wall -Wextra -O3. For example, if your source code is main.cpp and you wish the executable to be called main.exe, you can compile by

Ideally, this video is for fellow programming teachers to inculcate the value of loops. It can also be a side exercise where students would manipulate lines and colors instead of the usual text or number processing. I think, this can also be valuable for Math teachers teaching trigonometry and help the students appreciate sine and cosine.

If you encountered issues while creating your own Mandala Design, e-mail me at francis dot serina at gmail dot com. Also, I’d like to see your own mandala designs so please post in the comments below the results of your own artwork 😀