A fun calculus problem for kids – playing with derivatives and absolute value

I’ve been doing a few “calculus for kids” projects after seeing Grant Sanderson’s essence of calculus series. The series made me see that some of the high level ideas are completely accessible to kids and it has been fun to explore some of those concepts.

Today I thought it would be fun to see what they thought the derivative of absolute value would look like – they had some neat ideas:

Next I thought I would turn the problem around – what if absolute value was the derivative! What would the function look like. This problem was much more challenging. In the first video they spent most of the time just getting their head around the problem:

So, now that they had the ideas in place to solve the problem, they started drawing pictures. The process of getting to the correct graph was really interesting to watch:

The more I think about this calculus project, the more fun I think it is going to be. Many of the ideas in Sanderson’s series will be out of their reach, but some of the high level concepts are incredibly fun to share with kids.