The most significant thing I learned this week: Sketchpad. I have my usual questions- How can I make this software work? What do I want to learn more about? Duh: the dyna-graphs of course. Right away I remembered how we were supposed to memorize the basic graph shapes in Pre-calc and Calculus. This involved flash cards or photocopied sheets which gave you a one to one understanding of a shape to an equation. What if I could have also really intuitively learned how those functions' independent variables drove the dependent variables? I want to learn how to mke dyna-graphs.
Geometry has an infinite number of examples of shapes. We only learn a few, hardly infinite number of them, and let our brains build the sense of the infinite examples of a shape that are represented by a specific shape. Building and playing with the shapes in Sketchpad gets you closer to the infinite number of possible shapes than a year of diagrams could. Just monkeying with the shapes showed me new ways of thinking of shapes I thought I was completely familiar with. Teaching geometric shapes and teaching graph shapes seem like picking low fruit based on the power of what I saw in Sketchpad.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment