Conic Section Day 1-3

I always felt that my conic section unit was lacking and needed something that tied everything together. I had a bunch of activities, but nothing that was solid. I decided that the unit needed an overarching theme and some project based learning opportunities. I want it to be engaging and real world.

I settled on roller coasters.

Day 1:
Students have a virtual reality video to watch on DiscoveryVR where they ride a roller coaster. Then they have an introduction to conic sections where they are given play doh and a plastic knife to play surgery, I did this activity last year: Conic Section Surgery

Day 2:

I started with Parabolas and asked them to complete a Desmos Polygraph Activity over Parabolas.

Then I went over the first project with the students, students will construct a working paper roller coaster.









Students started their paper roller coasters.








Day 3:
Students read an article on Newsela about roller coasters and were asked to identify the main point, supporting details, essential elements, and asked them to circle words they didn't know. When they were done reading and annotating they were to summarize the article in two sentences using the essential elements.

Then we went over the first day of parabolas, where students graphed parabolas based on an equation.

#15: Conic Section Cartoons

One of my favorite parts of the end of the year is the conic section test I give.  I give students a blank comic section of Calvin and Hobbes and they color and have to describe one of the conic sections. (Circle, Parabola, Ellipse, or Hyperbola)  They use vocabulary and teach the subject to another in 8 frames. I also gave the students a chance to make their own comic strip and got an excellent response this year.

I wanted to give students a chance to show what they know in an unique way.

I also gave students a rubric and directions.

Students had to create a comic strip that explains the thought process involved in one of the following: Parabola, Circle, Ellipse, or Hyperbola.  The comic strip should explain the characteristics of the conic section, and it should show an understanding of the process.

Here is what the rubric looked like.  I gave students two days in class to work on it and it was due by the end of the second day.

Conic Section Surgery

I had students fill out a worksheet with their guided learning experience.  They cut the Play Doh in different ways to find circle, parabola, ellipse.  

Here is the link to the worksheet: https://goo.gl/1Ih64F

Materials:

Play Doh

Plastic Knives

Latex Gloves

Face masks

I made homemade PlayDoh which some of them didn't turn out as well as they could have.  The gloves made it more of an experience.  Next year I will see if I can get something to make it feel more authentic.