Miss Arguello's Classroom

Courtesy of pixabay.com  In my Math Activities for Secondary Teachers course, we have had the pleasure of exploring Desmos, a math site that can function as a calculator, form graphs, and has many interactive activities students can use to learn. We tried some of these activities in class. Notable mentions were Polygraph and Marbleslides. Polygraph can be thought of as a math Guess Who type of game: students are matched with a classmate, one classmate picks a graph, and the other must use yes or no questions to find the graph that their fellow student picked. This is especially useful in helping students become familiar in terminology such as intercepts, turns, degrees, and increasing/decreasing. Marbleslides is a game in which students must construct graphs in order to get the marble to roll into all the stars. This game can be done with all different types of functions (our class used rational functions) and is useful in helping students learn the behaviors of function grap...

Think back to when you were in high school, maybe even middle school. You can maybe recall your teacher telling you how to graph a parabola given an equation. You can probably recall (ax)^2+bx+c , and perhaps you can even recall the quadratic formula. But do you even remember how to find the equation of a quadratic function using the vertex form? Yeah, me either. You may be thinking: "Yeah, so what? Why is the vertex form of an equation important? Can't I just use the form I already know? Why isn't that good enough to teach students?" I'm not saying that the standard form of a quadratic equation isn't important, and I completely agree that it is essential that students know how to use the standard form of an equation, since it will be extremely useful as they get to know more families of functions. However, I don't think that the vertex form of an equation really gets the special spotlight that it deserves, and here's why. First of all, there's a...