The Rads arrive at the workshop to find Uncle Norm (sporting a black beret, and artist’s smock) with small sketches of the Inventonator. He is attempting to recreate the sketches in a larger format for the workshop wall—of course his attempts are sad-looking and not proportional—making it difficult to recognize the Inventonator at all. He realizes that he doesn’t know how to turn his small sketches into the giant outlines he needs. The Rads come to the rescue, helping Norm magnify the shapes by using math.

The Gist: A dilation is a type of geometric transformation that transforms an actual figure into a figure with different dimensions, without changing the shape of the original figure. A dilation can magnify a shape or reduce it in size. If the image is larger than the original, the dilatation is an enlargement. If the lengths have been doubled, the scale factor is 2. If the image is smaller than the original, the dilatation is a reduction. For this episode, we will focus primarily on the enlargement, specifically by using scale factors of 2 (doubling). Important vocabulary includes: enlargement, twice (or four or eight times ) as large, scale factor of 2 (or 4 or 8), similar (in math, this means the enlarged figure has different dimension but the same shape as the original), horizontal and vertical axis, gridpaper.