Day 123: Graphing Rose Curves

I gave them another set of graphs, and they had to figure out the equation using Desmos. It helped us get a better grasp of what the numbers control in rose curve equations.

Day 120: Polar Graphing

The task: I gave them pictures of limacons and rose curves. They had to come up with the equation of the graph using Desmos. As they figured out equations, they began to see patterns with the numbers.

Day 115: Desmos Activities

The kids worked on the Desmos activity Function Carnival today. They loved/hated it. The comments I got at the end of the day were along the lines of, "It made my head hurt but it was fun kind of and frustrating," "My brain is about to go BOOM!" and "Yes, we should use this program again because it makes you think, but my brain started hurting."

I consider all of those comments wins. They were struggling through problems together and weren't satisfied with half done answers. Most of them want to do something like this again, but also told me their brains hurt. I'm ok with that.

I'll write more about how I structured it and which activities I used later...

Also, sometimes we play.

Day 17: Piecewise Functions with Desmos

Talking with AP teachers in other departments (mainly science) at my school and some of their struggles over the last 4 weeks, I realized I was doing a disservice to my kids if I never made them struggle through a word problem as a group. They told me how bad their first tests were because the kids can't pick out what the question is asking. I need to force them to read and comprehend what a problem is asking which is a crucial skill in testing situations, and so often I just answer their questions instead of letting them work through it.

We've been discussing piecewise functions in class, and they have a lot of application. I found a decent word problem here and had the kids work through it today. We used Desmos to graph the situation because graphing things like this by hand a) takes a long time, b) never looks as pretty and c) loses some value. The discussions I heard were fantastic and letting the kids play with Desmos has been fun.