Signed Numbers

Inspired by @krisreid72 sharing this document with @Fouss , combined with the fact that I was looking for something that my trig students (who just finished a unit on solving triangles using Law of Sines/Law of Cosines) could wrestle with while I am out of the classroom Monday and Tuesday, I came up with an idea. The Amazing Race! random caveat: Season 14 had a deaf participant! I will give students 2 options - Option 1: No real trig involved, but still challenging thought processes and more stops to make Find the shortest "round-the-world" trip visiting many of the tallest buildings in the world. Assume (for the current purposes of this project) that you have a private jet/helicopter that can take off/land anywhere in the world. Primary tool: Google maps Go to http://brtva-math.wikispaces.com/ Click Trigonometry in the left navigation bar Click Amazing Race Follow the directions. Option 2: (taken from @krisreid72's project) Significant amount of t...

Recently in Trig, we've embarked on the task of graphing sine and cosine curves. Before this, we constructed the unit circle and students became familiar with the exact values of sin and cos at the special angles. To introduce the parent graphs, I used an activity that I found at Kate' s blog last year (who I'm sure got it from somewhere else, but I don't know where). To first see the "unwrapped" unit circle that is the sine (and later, cosine) function, students used yarn to mark intervals along the circumference of a unit circle, then used spaghetti to measure the y (later, x) value at each place. They then transfered these lengths of spaghetti to an x-y plane with x intervals of length matching the circumference intervals. This was a great picture for them of where the shape of the sine function comes from. One student even explained it (works much better in ASL), as though you've taken the bottom half of the unit circle and spun it around to make up ...