One of the ways math teachers use computers to help them teach, is to use computers to provide animated visualization tools to convey important concepts. You saw that with the parabola with sliders you created last class. Besides using sliders to make instantly changing graphs to help students understand the effects of different terms in a function, some math animations are:
Secant and tangent lines in the definition of the derivative. (Another version)
Circles and the sine (or cosine) curve
One you may never have thought of before is equal areas by shearing.
What other ideas would it be nice to have a computer illustration for?
Assuming we don’t spend the rest of the class going off on a tangent, we’ll look at ways to explore and learn about self similar fractals using the computer as a teaching and learning tool.
In the unlikely event that we get that far, we might look at
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