Glide Reflections Worksheets

What Are Glide Reflections? In mathematics, transformation is performed on geometric shapes to alter the form of the shape. These transformations are of four types: resizing, rotations, reflection, and translation. Rotation is the type of transformation that includes rotating or spinning the figure around a fixed point. Resizing includes shrinking, stretching, or dilating the geometric shape. Reflection of geometric shapes is thought of reflecting a shape across the line of reflection. Translation includes sliding or moving the shape along the line to a new location. Glide reflections change the orientation of the shape. If a polygon is traversed counterclockwise, its image will be traversed clockwise and vice versa. Also, glide reflections do not have a fixed point and lines, but it has a fixed axis of reflection. Glide reflections are a unique kind of geometric transformations. It is a combination of two types of geometric translation: reflection and translation. To perform glide reflection, we first slide (translate) the geometric shape and then flip it to achieve the glide reflection. In some cases, moving the pre-image to the image cannot be achieved by a single translation and reflection. Therefore, in such cases, we need a combination of reflection and translation. Some images are obtained by a single reflection; however, others may require two reflections.