Transformations of FUNctions: Headbanz and Space Race Fun

I totally stole this Headbanz idea from Mary Bourassa, and I took many of the equations from Meg Craig's Speed Dating handout. I had leftover stock card and ribbon from old projects and I used a box cutter to make the slices on either side of the stock card to put in the ribbon. (Note that we do not teach students transformations with both a horizontal stretch/shrink and slide until we get to trig functions.)

My rules: (I have never really played Headbanz, but here's what I did)

1. Once you have the headbanz on (ask someone if it's right side up), you may ask one person a question.

2. The person who answers CANNOT speak! (They can move their arms in the shape of parent functions, for example.)

3. That student now asks you a question in the same way.

4. Each of you moves on to a new person and continues in this fashion until you know the equation.

5. When you think you know the answer, come to me and I will tell you if you are right.

This was really fun to watch. They could ask, do I have a vertical stretch? Then next student, what is the vertical stretch, and that student could show with their fingers. They could not, for example, say, what is the number inside of the function? So they had to use math language like: reflection, horizontal stretch, shrink, translation left, and right.

It was very fun, and the students recommended that I keep the rules the way we did them. However, I definitely would do this DAY 2 instead of day 1 when I taught the lesson because they did not all have time to process the information enough on day 1.

Space Race from Quizlet

The day before I taught transformations, I taught parent functions. For homework, I assigned this Space Race from Quizlet. I told them to work on it for at least 10 minutes and email me a snapshot of their highest score. Kids love it, and they really learn the parent functions better than any other way I have used in the past. I tell them to study the phrases and equations as they are on the page you see when you open the link, because when they click on space race in the upper right hand corner, the graphs or names fly across the screen and they have to type it exactly as they see it...try it! There are high scores, and I give a prize for the student with the highest score in each class. Desmos needs Space Race, am I right??

Notes:

Here are my notes for parent functions (this includes piecewise functions) and then transformations of functions.




And my notes from Transformation of functions...I actually use the Chalkboard font, but here it looks much more playful...not sure why it changed!

Speed dating:

I am going to use this on Monday after we go over homework. (we have a 30 minute period) by lining up desks and having students sit across from each other. I will give them a few minutes a problem and then have one side shift to the left (with the last person coming around to the first desk.) They will first have to check their answer from the last "date" with the new "date," and then they can move on. I will try out the datexx timer I just bought. Did I see that from Julie? or Meg? I love twitter.

Homework and answers:

Who did I get this worksheet from??

Explain Everything Video:

As I said, I didn't think my students had enough time to process, so I made this video on Explain Everything, which I blogged about once here (my first blog ever.) I uploaded it to Google Classroom so they could watch it this weekend if they needed any help. It is NOT perfect...and I don't necessarily recommend that you use it...but I am showing it to show how easy it is to do--you can make a quick video to recap what you did and send it out to students. 

My rule for videos (as you can see)--make it once. Don't keep trying to fix what you did or what you said or it will take forever. Just make the correction and move on...unless REALLY wrong...I hope I did not make any mistakes that I didn't fix!

And that's it for transformations 2015. Any other transformation ideas?? Please send them along!