Linguine Math

My grade 11s are starting to learn periodic functions today, and we used the activity 8.5.2 Freddy the Frog rides the Mill Wheel, listed here

We started off by drawing 15 degree increments around the wheel, and then we measured the height of each wedge using linguine, which we snapped to length and glued onto the graph paper.

Students were able to make predictions about the repetitive nature of the graph, and felt that they didn’t need to snap and glue more pasta. The top curve of the graph shows Freddy’s height above the water, and the bottom curve of the graph shows Freddy’s height below the surface.

We consolidated with an introduction of new words like period, and amplitude, and axis, crest and trough. We looked at how we can do a sinusoidal regression on desmos that will give us a periodic graph. We also made connections to the quadrants and CAST rule, where we know that from 0-90 degrees, quadrant 1 sine is positive (just like on our graph) same for quadrant 2, from 90-180 degrees sine is positive, but from 180-270 quadrant 3 sine is negative, and also from 270-360 quadrant 4 sine is negative.

We’ll be looking at cosine graphs and sine graphs in more detail tomorrow.