What comes to your mind when you hear the word translate? Perhaps you think of translating a foreign language. For instance, hola means "hello" in Spanish, merci means "thank you" in French, and ciao means "good-bye" in Italian. Even in geometry, you can translate logic statements into symbolic form. In this topic, you will learn what it means to translate geometric figures. To translate a figure simply means to move it from one location to another without changing any attributes (size or shape) of the figure.

Imagine people taking an escalator to the second level of a shopping mall. The people standing on the escalator are not changing in size or shape, but their physical location is changing from the first floor to the second floor. The moving escalator is translating their position. Now you will explore how to translate shapes across the coordinate plane.

Essential Questions

• How do you translate a figure?
• What is the difference between the pre-image and the translated image of a figure?

 

Warm-Up

You have been hired by the captain of a ferry to safely navigate a ship into safe harbor. In this non-graded interactivity, you will complete each of the captain's commands by clicking the correct area on a grid in order to move the ferry. Click the player button to get started.