Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts

Thursday, December 30, 2021

Desmos Alternate Assessment Project 2021 Conics and Parent Functions

One of my favorite projects to do with my Honors Algebra 2 students is the Desmos alternate assessment that brings together everything students learned in the first semester. Students know how to graph all of the parent functions and conics, and their task was to create a drawing on Desmos that puts it all together. I love this project because it incorporates student identities and interests, which is essential according to Self-Determination Theory and Culturally Responsive Teaching. This year, I shared all projects in a Padlet so that students could easily see everyone else's. Students had to use their knowledge of domain and range to limit the functions and also had to think about how to create the perfect size and shape by, for example, figuring out the center, "a," and "b" for an ellipse. Many incorporated different colors and animations. 

Here are some of my favorites this year:


Here is the Padlet of all of the projects.


Made with Padlet

Here are my students' 2020 projects, 2019 projects, and 2018 projects. Here is the project outline, based on a project by Mr. Sumerton. If you do incorporate this project, please be sure to include an Honor statement that attests to the fact that students have not copied any of the equations or pictures. I am blown away by the number of projects I see online posted by their teachers that are blatantly copied. Please be aware of this; if there is no statement or discussion about this, students may be tempted to take the easy way out. The critical part of this activity is each individual's unique learning opportunity to create something from scratch using math. They are so proud of themselves! As they should be!!

Saturday, December 19, 2020

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!









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