Comments on: Noticing and Wondering with Trigonometric Identities

By: Zach Cresswell

Zach Cresswell — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 11:10:31 +0000

Oh I like the idea of using Desmos to have students sort through a set of graphs to find identities. I’ll have to remember to try that this year also. Nice idea.

By: Michael Fenton

Michael Fenton — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 03:50:14 +0000

Zach, thanks for the comment (and double thanks for the link to your blog). After seeing your approach, I’m tempted to revise mine so that students have a chance to sort pairs out of a larger group. Or maybe I’ll leave my first task in place, but I’ll include a new second activity where kids must use Desmos to sort ten graphs into five pairs, and THEN we’ll dive into proving them as identities.

Thanks again for stopping by the blog!

By: Zach Cresswell

Zach Cresswell — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 18:24:45 +0000

This sounds like a great way to introduce trig identities. I think I’m going to borrow your first document where you have students graph several examples and then record their observations. My friend and I did this (http://www.zachcresswell.org/get-the-students-up/ ) activity and had a lot of success with it the last two years. Thanks for sharing!