The Math Education Blog
I’m excited to be making my first presentation of the 2013-14 school year next week in Baltimore. Daniel Scher and I are presenting Picturing Functions and Functions of Pictures. We’ll be discussing the connections between pictures and functions. These connections are even richer than I realized when I first began to work with pictures in Sketchpad. In the...
Using Sketchpad, it is very easy to start from scratch and create a polar graph. Here are the steps to create the graph shown on the right below. Choose Graph | Plot New Function. Use the Equation menu to choose r = f(θ). Type “c” (for “cos”), “2”, and “th” (for “theta”). Click OK. If your angle...
The Web Sketchpad model below (and here) shows the function f(θ) = 1 – cos 2θ in both Cartesian and polar form. For each graph, the independent variable appears as a red bar that corresponds to a particular value of x (for Cartesian) or θ (for polar). The red bar has tick marks that show...