Well...I am truly a math geek at heart because I found something totally cool today. In ECMP class Alec showed us about a FREE site called Hot Potatoes. In this program you download you can create different on-line "tests" for your students. For instance you can create crosswords, fill in the black paragraphs, matching, and more.
I chose to create a math based cross word (pretty cool I think) and you can find it at my History of Math website under my activities page!
I am really excited about this...so I am going to go see what else I can create!!
= )
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Graphing Parabolas in Math 20
Well, if you happen to find yourself teaching math 20 one day, I've got a great site that you can use when you get to the Graphing Parabolas unit.
The site is called winplot What is winplot? Well it is a graphing applet, that allows you to graph a number of parabolas at one time...so what, you're probably thinking. Doesn't seem like a big deal...? But there's more!!
**Note: ^2 means that we are raising some value to the power of 2**
When you introduce your students into y = a(x-p)^2 and eventually y = a(x-p)^2 + q, what this applet allows you to do is really cool, and I will show you with an example.
graph y = x^2
the kids can now see what this graph looks like. All is good.
Next you want to edit the equation you already have. What you are doing to do is now type in y = (x-3)^2
what the kids are going to see is the graph y = x^2 move to its new location.
The reason why I find this really worked well, was because I wasn't just adding another graph onto the screen to confuse my students. What I was doing was moving that graph, in order to help them better visualize what happened.
After doing this with a few different graphs, the students can hypothesize about what happened, and if you do enough, they WILL get it!!!
So, winplot is free and it is easy to use. So my advice...?? Download it, play around with it, and use it if you ever teach anything on Graphing Parabolas.
To use winplot:
Once you have downloaded it, you will have to unzip the file into a folder that you want. Open up winplot, and go to Window and select 2-dimensional. Once you are in, click on Equation (at the top), and click on Explicit to do what we've been doing here.
Good luck and have fun!! = )
The site is called winplot What is winplot? Well it is a graphing applet, that allows you to graph a number of parabolas at one time...so what, you're probably thinking. Doesn't seem like a big deal...? But there's more!!
**Note: ^2 means that we are raising some value to the power of 2**
When you introduce your students into y = a(x-p)^2 and eventually y = a(x-p)^2 + q, what this applet allows you to do is really cool, and I will show you with an example.
graph y = x^2
the kids can now see what this graph looks like. All is good.
Next you want to edit the equation you already have. What you are doing to do is now type in y = (x-3)^2
what the kids are going to see is the graph y = x^2 move to its new location.
The reason why I find this really worked well, was because I wasn't just adding another graph onto the screen to confuse my students. What I was doing was moving that graph, in order to help them better visualize what happened.
After doing this with a few different graphs, the students can hypothesize about what happened, and if you do enough, they WILL get it!!!
So, winplot is free and it is easy to use. So my advice...?? Download it, play around with it, and use it if you ever teach anything on Graphing Parabolas.
To use winplot:
Once you have downloaded it, you will have to unzip the file into a folder that you want. Open up winplot, and go to Window and select 2-dimensional. Once you are in, click on Equation (at the top), and click on Explicit to do what we've been doing here.
Good luck and have fun!! = )
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