Hi all! As you can see, my submission for the Desmos art contest is called 'Climate change hasn't come to a stop…'. I decided that I wanted to illustrate the consequences of climate change in 4 pictures, surrounding the origin. I will explain a bit about how I made this and what for.
Back when I started working on this (a month or so ago), I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make something climate related because it felt very relevant and I thought that this might be a good way to raise more awareness. I know that by now, the whole climate change situation might feel irrelevant because of the Corona virus that is going around, but climate change does not stop happening because of that.
I took the four pictures that you can see in the graph to illustrate some damaging effects that climate change has on our planet. The one in the top right is a forest fire, caused by increased temperatures in Australia for example. The bottom right shows how living animals suffer from such effects on the environment. The bottom left situation is a flood, caused by the melting ice on the poles. The top left picture shows the so-called process of 'desertification', areas of land that have totally gone to waste because of a drier and warmer climate. I converted these real photographs into vectorized pictures that consisted of shapes with less colours, so it was easier to work with. These pictures were too big in size and got compressed when I imported them, so I split them up into 16 pieces so they would not be reduced in quality. (Big thanks to u/solvers_the_problem on Reddit, he is on the Desmos development team). All of these pictures are copyright free:
Top right:
https://pixabay.com/nl/photos/wildvuur-bos-brand-blaze-rook-1105209/
Top left:
https://pixabay.com/nl/photos/woestijn-droogte-samenstellen-van-279862/
Bottom left:
https://pixabay.com/nl/photos/hoogwater-parkbank-overstroomd-rood-123235/
Bottom right:
https://pixabay.com/nl/photos/ijsbeer-ijsberg-pakijs-noordpool-2199534/
I did not use tables for my submission, I just used inequalities in Cartesian form. This however meant that there was no way to decrease the transparency like you can do with tables, so that is why the colours are all a bit light.
I separated all the pictures into folders, you can turn those on and off if you like. The slider called 'k' is used to play the animations. If you want them to play more smoothly, it might be better to turn off some other folders. I kept the raw equations that I used to make all the inequalities. I put them in a separate graph because there are a lot of them, and they make everything lag a lot. (
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/canojnchcz)
I made all these lines with a small tool that I created myself. There are three points you can drag around, and it will then automatically draw a parabola right through all of those. Two of those points also have a straight line through them. To make the lines, I shifted these points around until the line/parabola fitted on the edge of the shape from the picture, and then I pasted the values for a, b and c or m and n into the formulas. I left this 'system' in the folder called 'tools'.
I did not only use parabolas and straight lines. There are a few other equations to be found all over the graph, like sine waves, exponentials and hyperboles. If you want to look at some pictures up close, i recommend turning off some other ones because that will make everything less laggy.
I would like to thank the people over at Desmos for creating such an amazing, free to use tool for everyone around the world! I love using it and it has helped me a lot with my own projects!
