Polar Coordinates and a fun #tbt

I covered a couple of Precalc classes today and got to teach about polar coordinates. I started with a clip of Crimson Tide (remember that movie? It's a great one!) so they could "see" some math.

"Math!", one of the kids yelled.

Then I handed out a couple of polar coordinate grids and told them there was an enemy sub right there. (I drew it on my projected computer.)
Where are we? (the origin)
How far away is the enemy?  (they counted the circles)
In which direction?  (we discussed using east of north vs an angle (measured from where?))
And then,
Is there any other way we could describe this location?  (Yep, with +360 angles, negative angles, etc)
So then we plotted a couple other points and came up with all kinds of different ways to get there.

Then, we got to the teacher's notes.  Because I spent so much time on the intro stuff, I didn't get completely through what she wanted me to. But I like getting them to think about what they're learning instead of just showing them, so hopefully she's ok with it.


And then on twitter today, there was this:


I guess freshmen aren't so bad. . .
:)

Comments