My older son has just started the trigonometry this week. I know the topic can be a little dry at the beginning, so I wanted to show him more than just unit circle exercises.
Today we looked at a few fun curves that you can make just by playing around with trig functions.
I stared by showing some simple graphs and then we moved to some 3d shapes:
Next we took a cue from an old project inspired by Henry Segerman:
Playing with Shadows inspired by Henry Segerman
Hopefully both the shape and the shadows come through in the filming – I haven’t figured out how to shoot shadows very well yet.
Finally I let the kids play around with the Mathematica code for a bit to create their own shapes. They had a couple of pretty fun ideas.
There was one little issue that came up on my younger son’s plot, unfortunately. I didn’t have enough detail in the plot to multiply the range by 10. That’s why his picture fuzzed out quite a bit. I didn’t see the problem on the fly, though, and wasn’t able to fix it in real time.
I’m excited to help my son learn about trig. Hopefully a few projects like this one will help him see that that there’s more to trig than just triangles!
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