In math we did 5 different activities on student.desmos.com and each activity revolves around parabolas and the equation behind it.
This is the first activity our class started off with. This activity was really fun basketball activity and a great visual for me starting off with this lesson. What we had to do is we we given pictures of different basketball shots and we had to analyze the shot and how the outcome of the shot would be. So we were given these pictures and we all had to write about what we think the shot was going to end up being like, then we find out later if our prediction was right. When showing us the results of how the shot was the shot was made in the form of a parabola. By the parabola we could see if the shot was like how we predicted.
BASKETBALL
This is how they made the shot into a parabola! This was a good kickoff to this subject for me because I could relate to this activity because I play lots of basketball and this was a great visual learning experience.
POLYGRAPH
This next activity is called Polygraph 1. This activity was a partner and class activity! As you can see there is a bunch of parabolas. In this activity you are partnered with someone in your class, but this activity goes by fast so once you finish you get partnered with another person in the class right away. So the reason there is a lot of parabolas is because this game is like a guessing game. What you do is one of the partners has chosen a parabola out of all those and the other person has to ask questions to try and figure out which parabola they chose. You ask questions like, "Is your parabola concave up?" or "Is your parabola in all four quadrants?" This made me familiar with all different kind of parabolas!
POLYGRAPH 2
This activity was really short, but really informative because this activity was all about teaching the correct terminology for things the commonly associated with parabolas. As you can see in the picture above it's explaining what concave up and concave down are. Before it tells you the correct terminology for something it has you guess or say a phrase or word that you might think can describe that something, so I guess it shows yourself where you were at with the terminology. I didn't a lot of these or didn't remember, so this was a good learning and memory-jogging experience.
MATCH
After getting taught a lot about the factors in a equation for a parabola, our teachers had us hop on Desmos do this activity that tests our knowledge about how to make a certain parabola. As you can see, I as assigned points around the graph that I had to plot parabolas through. Knowing this I implant a lot of lessons my teachers taught me like remember that the equation has x squared, not cubed or anything else or it won't be a parabola, which was very important to this activity.This was actually really fun to me to play around with equations to see what kind of parabolas I could create.
So to me this was definitely the most fun and challenging activity of them all, and it should be the most challenging because it is the final one we did. In this activity we had to create a parabola that's really a ramp for marbles to go off of and collect the stars located in random places on the graph. The slide I chose to show you is the challenge problem that was assigned to us. One of the teachers Mr. Kirby said that he couldn't solve it and for anyone that did, he would buy them lunch. I solved it and got free pizza! So this was definitely my favorite activity.
Desmos take-aways
1. How to plug in equations to create parabolas
2. I learned about a(x+h)+k and how it basically determines what kind of parabola you have and how it looks.
3. The a in the expression determines whether it's concave up or concave down. it also determines how wide or slim the parabola will be.
4. The h in the expression determines where the parabola is on the x axis. By that I mean it decides whether the parabola vertex is on right(positive) or on the left(negative).
5. The k in the expression determines where the vertex is on the y axis. By that I mean it decides where the vertex is on the graph either above the x axis(positive) or below the x axis(negative).
6. I also had to do a lot of explaining to people about parabolas on desmos which helped my leadership skills and also got a better understanding of parabolas in general.
7. I also learned the correct terminology associated with parabolas because of desmos.
2. I learned about a(x+h)+k and how it basically determines what kind of parabola you have and how it looks.
3. The a in the expression determines whether it's concave up or concave down. it also determines how wide or slim the parabola will be.
4. The h in the expression determines where the parabola is on the x axis. By that I mean it decides whether the parabola vertex is on right(positive) or on the left(negative).
5. The k in the expression determines where the vertex is on the y axis. By that I mean it decides where the vertex is on the graph either above the x axis(positive) or below the x axis(negative).
6. I also had to do a lot of explaining to people about parabolas on desmos which helped my leadership skills and also got a better understanding of parabolas in general.
7. I also learned the correct terminology associated with parabolas because of desmos.
GOAL
My goal this year is to become a leader in math. By that I mean I've always been someone that understands the math but I've never been one teach my table how to do a problem or someone that people go up to and know that they will get a good math explanation.
Edits
Did not get any feedback for edits, both critiques gave me 5/5.