From Equations To Imagination!
When the imagination and math collide, it results in some pretty amazing pieces of art. Rachel Tisdale’s Honors Precalculus class was busy last week learning how to turn trigonomic functions into creative pictures. The instructions were as follows, “Create a picture or design by using trigonometric functions with restricted domains. You may also add other functions (linear, quadratic, cubic, exponential, logarithmic, rational, etc) to add details to the picture. You may draw your picture by hand or use Desmos to create your picture.”
Students took these words and went to work using various functions that included sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, and cosecant, to create graphs that would eventually form the pictures that they wanted to create.
Students created everything from marsh scenes, to snowmen, to funny faces.
“Students are able to use different parts of their brain,” explained Tisdale. “Projects, by nature, involve synthesizing and analyzing information in a way that does not always happen in a standard instructional setting. What really makes my teacher's heart happy is seeing the students who may not excel in a traditional math setting step up to really surprise you when given the opportunity to complete a challenge creatively.”
The students loved the opportunity to get creative as well. “I liked this project,” said 11th grader Evan Seay. “It was a fun way to apply trig functions in the real world.”
“It was a fun way to see God’s creativity through math,” said Ana Tyler.
We enjoyed seeing the incredible innovation of our students as they demonstrated both mathematical understanding and imagination.