Dot-to-Dot

A silhouette sampled into numbered dots: connect 1, 2, 3… and the picture appears.

What it is

Parametric silhouettes — heart, star, flower, fish, house, rocket — sampled along their outlines into a numbered tracing order. The shapes are curves and vertex lists, not clipart, so stars vary their point count and inner radius, flowers their petal count, and orientation varies by seed where the shape survives rotation (an upside-down heart reads as a mistake, so it stays upright).

How to play

Start at the enlarged dot 1 and draw to each next number in turn; the final dot connects back to 1. The answer key shows the traced outline.

Why it is in the catalogue

A pillar of the activity-book category, and a generator whose craft is in the numbering: a dot-to-dot fails when labels crowd or two dots sit so close the pencil cannot tell which was meant.

The implementation’s guarantees

• Spacing is the mandatory check: every pair of dots — consecutive or not — must clear a floor derived from the label size, and the sampler thins the dot count until it holds. The metadata reports both the requested and the surviving count, and the measured min_gap_pt.
• Corners survive resampling: polygon vertices are always dots — a star with its points rounded off is not a star.
• Labels are placed outward from the shape’s centroid, where the drawn line will not run through them.
• Rating basis: dot_count (Easy ≤ 25, Medium ≤ 55, Hard above). unique means the numbering admits one sensible tracing under the spacing floor.