This work on construction is based on a long history of geometry that can be traced back to the time of Euclid's Elements and earlier. One focus here is provided by the National Curriculum (for England) and the National Numeracy Strategy (including the Framework for Teaching Mathematics: Year 7), enabling students to fulfill school curriculum requirements whilst at the same time learning something about the history of mathematics.. The three levels Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced cover between them KS1, KS2, KS3, KS4 Foundation and Higher and beyond.

All the elements in these units use interactive geometry. This means that you must use the mouse to click, hold and drag parts of the diagrams and thus alter them as you wish. You can also construct points, lines and circles to solve problems. See the "Buttons" page for more on this, including an interactive test to check you understand how some of the main buttons work. Please note that the very first topic you choose may take time to load, but all later topics will load much more quickly. Be patient! See the Tech page for more details about this.

By the time you have worked through the majority of these tasks ranging from Foundation to Advanced level, you should have developed a collection of construction skills that you can apply to the real world of pencil, straight edge and compasses constructions - in fact those constructions that can be traced back to Euclid's time.

In order to encourage practical applicability, many tasks concentrate on use of three main construction buttons for constructing points, lines and circles, shown to the right.

Note that an additional circle construction button is also used. The difference between its operation and that of the compass button deserves explanation, particularly as over 2000 years ago Euclid saw this as an important stage in the development of geometric construction. See Circle construction. See also a section on Circle-only constructions

In later tasks, particularly those in the Advanced section, persistant use of these buttons may make some constructions unnecessarily lengthy and complicated. In such cases, other "short-cut" buttons are made available. These could be viewed as macros, in the sense that they only enable constructions that could have been made by the three shown above - but the construction is achieved in one step rather than a sequence of steps.

A macro is, of course, very much a computer concept, but each macro button is similar in essence to a specific item of geometrical equipment, ie., the set square, ruler or protractor.

Finally... One key construction in these materials, and one that is clearly emphasised in the UK National Curriculum, is that of constructing the line perpendicular to a given line. This, and the related task, construct the midpoint of a line segment, first appear at Intermediate level.