Desmos write up
For the last few weeks we have been learning about parabolas and how to graph them using Desmos which is a online graphing calculator. This gave us the chance to experiment with different numbers and equations to shape the parabolas into any shape we wanted. This was very useful and we were able to understand parabolas much better
Basketball shotsFor the first day of working on Desmos we tried to estimate if certain shot at a basketball hoop would go in our miss. What I would do to see if the shot would go in or out, would be to make an imaginary path of where I thought the ball would go. I found it somewhat effective but I still didn't guess all of them right.
|
Drawing parabolas |
Playing guess who with parabola.After we were somewhat informed of what a parabola was we played a game of guess who against our classmates. You can see to the left what the game looked like. The goal of this activity was to learn the vocabulary of parabolas, so for example in the beginning of this activity a question I asked was is your parabola shape like a happy face. Towards the end of the activity I asked the same question but with different vocabulary, my question was does your parabola have a positive concave. This helped us because we were able to ask questions to each other, our teachers and we all new what we were talking about.
|
After we had a better understanding for what a parabola was and what it looked like, we did and activity were they gave us instructions to draw a certain parabola like I did on the left. An example of instructions for what parabola they wanted us to draw was something like make your parabola's vertex be in the middle and have both ends touch the x axis.
|
Marble challenge |
Manipulating parabolas For our fourth activity we started to work on making parabola but with the vertex form, so what they would do is give us three points that our parabola had to touch and we would put in an equation based on where they wanted the parabola to be. You can see to the left one of the problems that we had to solve, if you look closely you can see the dots that our parabola's had to touch and if you look to the left you can see the equations I used for each parabola.
|
For our final activity we had to modify parabola so that these marbles would touch certain points on the graph. You can see to the right the small yellow spots are the ones we were supposed to hit and the purple spots are the marble, so once you would hit the launch button your goal was to make the marbles hit the yellow stars. So what we were doing most of the time was guessing and checking which did work.
|
7 things I learned from Desmos
- (a) from the equation y=a(x-h)²+k is what makes the parabola have a up or down concave and how wide it will be.
- (h) from the equation y=a(x-h)²+k is what makes the parabola go left or right depending on the number.(h>0 moves right, h>0 moves left)
- (k) from the equation y=a(x-h)²+k is what makes the parabola go up or down.
- If (a) is big number your parabola will be slim and if your number for (a) is smaller it will be wider.
- Concave up is when your parabola will look like a happy face.
- Concave down is what makes your parabola look like a sad face.
- Parabolas have to be squared, they cant be cubed.
Self assessment
My goal at the beginning at the semester was to have a better understanding for math in general and I think I did contribute to that goal with this topic and especially since I was able to understand it. I think that the reason I was able to understand everything was that using Desmos and just parabolas in general seemed interesting to me so it made me want to understand it even more. Overall I think I contributed to my goal pretty well with this topic but there is still a lot more I need to work on.
Problem evaluation
I think we would of understood parabolas without using Desmos but having it there definitely made it much more interesting and fun to understand. I also think that since it is on the computer and we would be able to plug in any numbers it made it trying to find certain answers much easier without having to write everything down and trying to see if it would work, so it saved a lot of time and worked really well.
Edits I made
They edits I made to my DP were to make the images bigger so that they would be clearer and to add more to the playing guess who activity.