Wednesday, January 01, 2014

Calculus: f and f ' graphs

Happy New Year! Happy New Calculus Activity. 

I'm not 100% (okay, even 60%) sure my students fully grasp the challenging topic of how y = f(x) and y = f ' (x) graphs can be looked at to give you information about the "other" graph, so I just made this activity to welcome them back to the first day of Second Semester. 

I'm all for using technology, but I think (maybe everyone does and is rolling their eyes now) that putting their chubby little hands on pencil and paper and manually creating things will take the "magic" out of things and allow the kidlets time to process what's happening and what it means.

Also: Dear Spaghetti, thank you for being an awesome math tool that I can use over and over for a cheap cost and effective tool not only for math but for bad jokes about eating the tools afterward and such.









4 comments:

  1. Seriously awesome...should have thought of using spaghetti.mmthank you!

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  2. Woot! Thank you ... I haven't road tested it yet, obviously, but hopefully there will be good connections made. And I can't STRESS spaghetti enough. Easy, cheap, effective for short tangent line movement.

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  3. Thanks for this. I mentioned it on my blog this week http://ontariomath.blogspot.com/2014/01/math-links-for-week-ending-jan-3rd-2014.html

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  4. Love this!!! As much as I hate to admit it, I never feel quite comfortable going from f' graphs using short tangent lines to f(x). :-( But - this is helping.

    (Btw, f(x) to f'(x), no problem.)

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