The native peoples of Puerto Rico had a religious tradition that revolved around the worship of zemís or cemís. Cemís were either gods, spirits, or ancestors. There were two supreme gods: Yúcahu,[15] which means spirit of cassava, was the god of cassava (the Taínos main crop) and the sea and Atabey,[16] mother of Yúcahu, was the goddess of fresh waters and fertility. Cemí was also the name of the physical representations of the gods. These representations came in many forms and materials and could be found in a variety of settings. The majority of cemís were crafted from wood but stone, bone, shell, pottery, and cotton were also used. Many of them had distinctively triangular shapes and were suggestive of the sharp peaks of the island's landscape.
You will have the chance to use a protractor and try to acurately measure the angles that the Taínos used to make their cemis. Then you will use Geo Sketchpad to recreate the shape as best you can using your measurements, When you are done, you can compare your results with the original image. You may even want to take the angles and segments you have constructed and personalize you own version of the features on your cemi.
Here are the steps you need to follow:
1. Go to the page of cemi images and choose one that you would like to try to measure and recreate.
http://cemim.blogspot.com/
2. Print a paper copy of your image so you can measure the angles and segments of the shape with your protractor.
3. Record your data for every angle and segment you wish to include. Remember that these idols were hand crafted and designed to have curves, so your shape is not going to be 100 percent accurate.
4. Go to Geo Sketchpad and reconstruct the shape using the measurements you took down. Don't worry if unit of measurement for the lengths of the segment is not the same. Remember that if the ratio is the same for two shapes, they will be similar. If you have to, you can grow your image later in a photo editing program to match it back up to the scale of the original picture.
5. Enter all your measurements used to recreate the shape on Geo Sketchpad so that it can be printed out or transfered over with your final sketch outline of the shape.
6. When you think you have recreated the shape accurately and have a digital record of all the measurements. Select all and copy your shape and your measurements.
7. Open up photoshop or similar photo editing program and paste your drawing onto the new blank canvass. Make sure the canvass is big enough to hold all of your shape, then push paste and your shape should appear on the canvass. Save your shape as a jpeg document.
8. Now open up the picture from the web page and copy to the clipboard or save it to the disk. Open up another photo-editing project and paste or save the original cemi image to the new blank canvass.
9. Select all and copy all of your Geo Sketchpad shape, then paste it on top of the original cemi image. Use the opacity slider to make your sketch shape semi-transparent.
10. Resize the sketch shape if you have to by using the transform command while holding down the shift key and pulling from the corner to keep your shape from stretching out, and compare to see how accurately you measured.
Here is an example of a pretty rough one done without a good protractor. The measurements are included to show what they should look like from the program, but if they don't fit alongside your sketch, save them onto a separate jpeg file.