Desmos and Conics

I was sitting during a break in my parent conferences last Thursday evening trying to decide what to do the next day in Precalc. I had a review packet for polynomials ready (because I refuse to teach them again to a group of honors kids who learned it last year) but I wanted to take a little break to do something fun.

And what's more fun than Desmos?!

We just finished a unit on conics (added in this year because it got lost in the common core transition) and I thought it might be a good time to play with the equations. I remembered Bob Lochel doing something with conics and desmos, so I checked out his blog and found his conics project posted.

I read through his requirements and made a few changes. Here's what I came up with:

The students' task:  Create a picture using conics
Requirements:
1. Use at least one of each type of conic (hyperbola, parabola, ellipse, circle)
2. Incorporate color
3. Turn in both a digital copy and a hard copy

That's it!  I was a little nervous about not giving them more guidelines but I wanted the students to be able to really play and create on their own.  The projects are due on Friday but I've already gotten a few submissions, and I am super impressed!

Some of the students are going above and beyond what I expected - my current favorite is an owl whose wings flap. It definitely took some learning on the student's part (and mine!) to figure out how to tilt the wings [ellipses] so that they weren't just vertical or horizontal. And then she figured out the animation.

I started creating a google slideshow with images of the kids' work... I'm going to post it below. Right now there are only a few images, but remember this isn't due for 3 more days!  As I add to the slideshow it should update below.

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