With my Trigonometry students today I wanted to cover how to use a compass and straight edge to do constructions. Again I have to bow down to Dan Meyer for an excellent idea.
In his comment about the opening day of summer school, he mentions using a handout with five simple questions asking the students to answer them with a compass and straight edge. I emphasized to my students that there was more than one way to get to the correct answers and that I was looking for some interesting approaches. About half of the students used compasses, the rest were die hard straight edge followers, going to great lengths to not use the compass. When it came to the final question where they had to find the point equidistant from three other points only one group of students was able to do it, and were rewarded with the ability to skip three problems on their next assignment.
Then, I reviewed how to reflect an object about the x or y axis when given a coordinate graph to work from. I then challenged the students to do the same with only a compass and straight edge. and was amazed at how accurate some of the students were how quickly. I will post pics here later of some of the constructions, but they were definitely not what I had been expecting!
In his comment about the opening day of summer school, he mentions using a handout with five simple questions asking the students to answer them with a compass and straight edge. I emphasized to my students that there was more than one way to get to the correct answers and that I was looking for some interesting approaches. About half of the students used compasses, the rest were die hard straight edge followers, going to great lengths to not use the compass. When it came to the final question where they had to find the point equidistant from three other points only one group of students was able to do it, and were rewarded with the ability to skip three problems on their next assignment.
Then, I reviewed how to reflect an object about the x or y axis when given a coordinate graph to work from. I then challenged the students to do the same with only a compass and straight edge. and was amazed at how accurate some of the students were how quickly. I will post pics here later of some of the constructions, but they were definitely not what I had been expecting!