Cartesian and Polar Graphs
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Tag Archives: Sketchpad
Exponential Harmony with Sketchpad
Last week was the fourth session of my spring Advanced Secondary Math Methods class at the University of Pennsylvania. Each year I assign a semester project in which groups of three students use lesson-study techniques—on a small scale—to create, test, refine, teach, evaluate, and document specific shared instructional products, composed of a (possibly multi-day) lesson … Continue Reading ››
A Swan Song for Sweet Karen Coe
Today I leave for my first proper vacation in a year and a half. Last time I took such a vacation, Key sold its high school textbooks to Kendall Hunt and transformed from a publishing company to a educational technology company. This time I just hope to survive the end of the world. 🙂 Before … Continue Reading ››
Creating Origami Whirlpool Designs with Sketchpad
Tomoko Fuse is a Japanese origami artist whose designs are highly geometric. A Google search for her origami models reveals a plethora of boxes and intricate three-dimensional structures, many of which are folded from multiple sheets of … Continue Reading ››
ICME: The Nature of Students’ Mathematical Thinking
Like other enthusiasts of mathematics, I’m captivated by the way that mathematical ideas can explain things in the physical world around me, and by the way that I can carry out mathematical thought experiments in my mind and then apply the results to control my external physical environment.
Continue Reading ››ICME: A Sensory-Motor Experience of Korea
I had the immense good fortune this year to attend ICME, the International Congress on Mathematical Education. The Congress is held every year divisible by 4, and this iteration (the twelfth) was held in Seoul, Korea. It is quite something to be at a meeting of nearly 4000 … Continue Reading ››
Functions Come Alive in a Precalculus Classroom
Ken Gordon has written our first in a series of guest blog posts from people working with Key Curriculum products in schools. Ken teaches Precalculus and Calculus in an accelerated program at Sisler High School in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He has been using The Geometer’s Sketchpad since first seeing it at an NCTM conference in 2004. … Continue Reading ››
Sketchpad Reflection Puzzles
In a recent blog post, Karen Greenhaus describes how it's possible to construct familiar corporate logos using Sketchpad. You might start with a rhombus, for example, and then reflect it twice to … Continue Reading ››
Sketchpad Activities, Cognitive Demand, and Differentiation
Not long ago, I conducted a Saturday morning PD session for some Texas teachers participating in an NSF research project.
(The research is a controlled study of the relationship between students’ use of Sketchpad and their conjecturing and proving behavior. I hope we’ll have a blog post about this study itself before too long.)
Because of the … Continue Reading ››
Exploring Conic Sections with Sketchpad
As a student, I didn’t place conic sections on my list of favorite high school topics. The standard textbook treatment of the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola seemed uninspired. There were messy algebraic equations with multiple square roots. There was lots of terminology. Drawing a conic meant plotting several points on graph paper and connecting them with … Continue Reading ››