Best Desmos Conics Projects of 2022 - 2023

 

I'm finally getting around to posting these projects! Here is the link to the assignment and past projects.

Desmos Conics projects 2020 with Animation and Short Video Explanations for Students including how to change colors

Well, some good came from 2020 this year, and that is my student Desmos projects. I've posted my students' conics project in 2019 and 2018, but what turned out great this year was that they couldn't be printed, so students actually worked more on discovering animations. Below are some of the best ones. But first the rules...Students must have at least one ellipse, circle, parabola, hyperbola, and another parent function as a minimum. 

What did students learn/solidify? The student was able to:

• Plan a unique design from start to finish using what they learned about graphs in an Algebra 2 Honors class
• Predict shapes and locations based on the transformations of the graphs we learned in class
• Generalize what they have learned about transformations on graphs to what they haven't yet learned, such as y=asinbx + c.
• Construct pictures by analyzing and synthesizing their own piecewise shapes 
• Illustrate knowledge of domain and range by limiting their graphs 
• Demonstrate knowledge of inequalities through shading and domain and range restrictions

For some more than others:

• Infer from examples of how to apply animation 
• Explain how to animate and use shading arrangements (see student video links at the end)

Twin artists first drew their concepts and then "desmofied" them. 

The shoes had 199 lines of equations and the skater had 378 lines of equations/points.

Some animations, with the help of Twitter!

From @quantgal67: Okay, I was doing something similar, trying to make water move. So I played around with this and here is a link to a little how-to video and a @Desmos graph:
video:https://t.co/nUQK998QPK
desmos: https://t.co/DXpCtRa6Kj

— Laurie Hailer, M.A., M.Ed. (@quantgal67) December 13, 2020

This student recreated a painting of a bird that she did. The first picture is the overlay and the second picture is without it. 

Finally, here are some short student-made videos that you may want to use for your classes.

• Student made video on how to animate in the shape of absolute value.
• Student made video on how to arrange order of shading on Desmos (so one object pops in front of another) 
• Student made video on how to shade between two graphs
• Student made video on how to rotate an ellipse
  
• Student made video on how to add different colors to DESMOS
  

 

Conic Sections Projects using Desmos 2019 for Algebra 2 Honors or Pre-Calculus

This is only the second year that I have done Conics Projects on Desmos. (Click here for previous Conics Desmos Project post). This year, I taught conic sections in the first semester, and so I assigned this before Thanksgiving break in case students wanted to work on it. They did a fantastic job!

I think this project is great for several reasons, but mainly:

• It's open-ended
• They really learn about domain restrictions and intersections
• They can use conic sections as well as parent functions, so it ties concepts together
• They can relate math to something they enjoy
• It's creative
• They researched things I haven't taught them yet: inequalities, trig graphs, and lemniscates, for example

This year I added a peer review. I got the idea from my graduate class in Applied Learning. Each student was assigned a peer, and they had to say something that they liked about the project and something that they thought could be improved. They had to send this to me, and then I sent it to the peer, which ensured good quality and no negative comments. Then, the students had to make a change based on their peer's recommendation. Honestly, they gave better critical feedback than I ever could have! (See below for more info on the peer review).

Here are some of their projects.

Examples of how the Final Project was turned in:

Peer Review:

How I set up the peer review. Each student sent their project to the person after the arrow. The person after the arrow then sent their response to me, which I read and then forwarded to the student. 

 Cristi ->Will -> James->Manci-> He ->Lucas ->Bobby  ->Grace  ->Irina-> Leo->dylan  ->zach ->andres ->anthony -> niamh ->ella ->ashley ->zhongxuan ->

blake ->jack ->cristi

A Great Peer Review

Here is my Rubric.

RUBRIC 30 POINTS TOTAL

_____ 4 points Creativity

_____ 3 points Colorful

_____ 5 points Sophistication of conics

_____ 4 points Use of domain restrictions

_____ 5 points Final project with all conics shown prominently is printed in color do not wait till the last minute to do this, nor have poor printer quality and pasted on construction paper

_____ 4 points Equations printed out and pasted next to picture on construction paper (can go off the

            page if necessary.)

______5 peer review turned in on time (-2 if late per day) (graded separately – not part of 30 points)

______5 peer review emailed to me (graded separately - not part of 30 points)

______5 corrections based on peer review

How this project related to my Doctoral study in the Applied Learning Sciences

(Excerpt from my paper)

I believe that the way I teach is an amalgamation of several learning theories: Piaget’s constructivism, Papert’s constructionism, Vygotsky’s social constructivism, and even Behaviorialist theory, when I need to get facts across quickly. However, with my learning project, I am going to focus on Papert’s Constructionism, where “learners make knowledge their own,” (Kafai, 2006 p. 39) and physical objects are important. Using ideas gleaned from Piaget when he worked with him in Geneva, Seymour Papert found it was possible to learn abstract concepts concretely through objects-to-think-with. The objects my students will think with are graphs of conic sections. As of this writing, my students are learning how to graph and find equations of conics, yet I believe that they do not quite have ownership of the concept. It is something they know they need to study to pass the course, but I think that the topic is abstract and separate from them. Through the creative drawing activity, students will be transforming the ideas taught in the classroom and will express them through the website Desmos.com. Similar to LOGO, students will create designs of their choosing by “telling” the computer what to do; in this case, entering equations and playing with them until they are in the “correct spot,” that is, getting it out of their heads and onto paper. Every student can (and is encouraged to) relate conics to something that they enjoy, for example: create a beach scene, a zoo, a hockey arena, or a videogame scene, for example. The hope is that they will appropriate their knowledge to make it their own (Kafia, 2006).

Kafai, Y. B. (2006). Constructionism. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (1st ed.) (pp. 35–46). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

A Great Conics Project Using #Desmos

I have assigned conic picture projects wayyyy before Desmos. My students did them by hand in the old days, and even on TI-83's (not easy) after that. This is the first time I ever did the project using Desmos, and it was a huge success. My students exceeded my expectations. Here is the project, some of which I got Mr. Sumerton.


Not only did students make great pictures, they did some pretty awesome math in the intersection part. And they told me that they really understood translating and conics so much better! Here are some pictures of their work.

What was even cooler is that some learned about trig curves and polar curves and how to rotate conics, even though they did not learn that in class.

And my other students, who saw the projects on display, were so impressed with their work! They wanted to know how the graphs were made, etc.

Above are parts of projects--I didn't take every picture because it would have been a lot.

Below is one full project, with the graphs made on Desmos colored in, the equations, and the points of intersection shown on Desmos and done algebraically. 

And here is a close-up of one student's intersection work. 

*Note: if you see any of these projects already online, please let me know, as we have a strict honor code on plagiarism. In addition, my students worked super hard on their projects and have gotten very upset when they see their projects copied online after I showcase their work on this blog. Let's keep sharing ideas and encouraging students to come up with their own  :)