[sorry for the super quick and un-edited write up on this one]
Had a nice time going through Christopher Danielson’s intermediate value theorem activity with my older son yesterday:
Using Christopher Danielson’s Intermediate Value Theorem Desmos Activity with Kids
So, this morning I thought it would be fun to try it with my younger son. He also had a good time, which was nice. Even though he’d not seen some (well, most) of the ideas in this activity before, he had some great ideas and we had a great talk.
Here’s a direct link to Danielson’s activity:
[post publication addition – Danielson has written a blog post about the activity. It is here:
A New Calculus Activity Builder activity by Christopher Danielson ]
At the beginning of the activity I have to explain a few ideas to my son, but he gets the main points fairly quickly.
I started off the second activity by explaining a simple definition of continuity. It was lucky that I’d been through this activity before with my older son so I had a explanation for kids handy.
The nice thing on this activity is that my son thought about how this “line” might not be a line.
The third part as a function that’s a little more wiggly and also is defined on a short interval. My son did a really nice job thinking through the problems here:
Now we got to the non-continuous function. As with my older son, I highlighted the non-continuity here. I chose this approach because my kids are not familiar with continuity so I think I’d rather have them intentionally think through the idea.
I really liked that my son learned something from the answers the class submitted on one of the quesions.
Finally the wrap up question – can we take a guess at the intermediate value theorem from the exercises? I love the ideas that my son had here:
So, a fun exercise with both kids. Sorry for the quick write up – I have a work meeting in 30 minutes – but I’m really happy with this activity and how it can be used with kids.
Mike's Math Page 