Phrogram team,
Attached (see below) is my entry for the Phrogram contest. The inspiration was the desire to manage the woods that surrounds our home in Minnesota, USA. I used GoogleEarth to get a satelite view of our property. I printed this on a piece of paper. I then drew crude rectangles and triangles and used GoogleEarth to give me some of the lengths of the sides and heights of these simple polygons.
Then, and here is the hard part - I asked my daughter to calculate the area of our woods using the data I had put on paper. Well, a week later and after a lot of bugging... she finally did it. All this time I thought to myself, "I could write a program to do this faster than she was taking to calculate the area of the woods!'
CalculateArea is the result.
Read the comments at the start of the program for more details. I have included other sample image files that allow you to calculate the area of other objects, such as a circle (with a radius = 1, try to get as close to pi (3.1415...) as possible!), rooms in a house's floor plan, the state of Minnesota, and, of course, the original satelite map of our property.
I think the coolest part, honestly, is that the mathmatics to calculate the area of an n-sided polygon is gnarly looking with determinants and summations: see
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PolygonArea.html
But, due to the power of programming and programming languages like Phrogram - it really just boils down to a handful of lines of code in a simple For loop. So, my math entry is less than five lines of "mathmatics" supported by a few hundred lines of "making it useful for a real-life need!"
Best of luck to all the contest entries!
Regards,
ChristmasWhistler
http://www.christmaswhistler.com(\ _/)
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