These are some of my thoughts about teaching mathematics. The purpose of this blog is to help me reflect and become my best teaching self. #MTBoS #iteachmath
Friday, September 8, 2017
Teach 180: Did I Break Desmos? (Day 8)
We continued working with factorials and counting methods today in Calculus. Near the end of class a student asked what the graph of C(11,x) would look like? Would it be like a parabola, going up and coming down? (Note: I love the students in my school for thinking like this and being willing to ask these questions.) We quickly looked at a table of values and noted that the values went up and then back down as x changed from 0 to 11. Then, I said "We have 2 minutes before the bell rings. Let's look at the graph in Desmos." Here is what we got.
Wait a minute!!! What is going on here??? Why does this look like a step function??? Why is it plotting values for non-integer values of x??? Did I break Desmos??? At that point the bell rang and I told my students that I would ask Desmos what was going on here. And I know that on Monday they won't forget to ask me what the folks at Desmos said.
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