Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Geoboard part 3

I've found that students often have difficulty translating the counting of squares on the graph to using the slope formula.  To most of my students, these are two totally different concepts.

So I've started having students find two points on the geoboard like in the picture to the left.  They turn the line into a triangle so they can see the rise and the run or the difference in Y values and the difference in X values.

They use the pen to draw lines showing the two y values and write down the difference and repeat the process for the x values as shown in the picture.  This provides students with a visual.  The next step is to calculate the slope using the standard formula to verify the visual. 

This is the first time I've done this activity and so far, it is proving to help students understand the process better.  By drawing the lines, it helps students understand its a difference or distance between the two values of Y or X.    I have been looking for something like this and I finally found it.  Yeah!

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