Choose Your Conflicts

Try to guess the conflicts needed to generate a shape and watch your prediction grow

Plant shapes arise through conflicts between regions trying to grow in different rates or directions.

Explore patterns of growth to find out how a flat disc grew into a shape. A clue is in the way the initial spots have become deformed during growth.

The first element in a growth pattern is whether some regions grow faster than others.

Choose where you think growth should happen faster to generate the final shape (green is fast, white is slow)

The second element in a growth pattern is whether growth is faster in some orientations (anisotropic) or equal in all directions (isotropic)

Choose the pattern of arrows along which growth should happen fastest to generate the final shape (no arrows = isotropic)

Combining these two elements of the growth patterns results in:

Well done!

You chose the correct growth options for your selected plant shape.