The Cuisenaire-Gattegno Log Cabin

Rods! Or more specifically, Cuisenaire® Rods! Staples of my childhood arithmetic education: coloured wooden rods (now plastic, which will save them from the mouldy fate that befell some sets at Mearns Primary School), 1 × 1 × 1–10 centimetres long. Use them for counting, number lines, don’t-do-that renditions of Sun Arise, but absolutely never for flinging at tiny classmates.

Since it may actually have been Mrs. Cuisenaire who came up with the concept of rods, I drew a log cabin quilt section in virtual rods. The Gattegno in the title refers to Caleb Gattegno, the mid-century educator who popularized Cuisenaire’s work.

Should you too feel the need to have a virtual set of rods, here are some files you can play with in Inkscape (or any other SVG-aware editor):

rods.svg — A palette of horizontal and vertical rods
rods.svg — A palette of horizontal and vertical rods
rods-quilt.svg - source for the header image
rods-quilt.svg – source for the header image

The colours might be a bit off reality, but they’re near enough. I found it helpful to set a grid snap in Inkscape to 1 cm so that you could get the rods to align easily. If you want to get really nerdy, here’s the PostScript source I used to create the rods: rods.ps. I think I finally got the hang of basic arrays in PostScript …

Creating this was in no way a means of me displacing getting round to doing my taxes this year, nosirree.


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