Suggestion for the "Explorer" apps

[Arno K]

(06-24-2015 05:51 AM)cyrille de brébisson Wrote:  Hello,

The 3 explorer apps have one and only one aim: help kids that are learning linear, quadratic and trig function to understand the symbolic/graphical link specific to this function form. Trig explorer is also great to teach how extra parameters around an existing function of X affects the graphical representation of the function.

This means that for about 1h in the life of someone they are incredibly useful and that they are then worth nothing (or useless as you put it).

Place a quad explorer app in the hand of a math teacher that teaches at that level and see their eyes pop out as they immediately see the value of it.

Cyrille

I must strongly underline that point. Some years ago I wrote something similar for my mobile where I had (and still have) a program now called MathStudio, very powerful but with restricted usefulness because of missing commands for entering data. I have linear, quadratic und trigonomic functions with sliders to alter parameters that directly influence the plot. Each time one of my pupils had to learn these functions I first explain a bit about them, then manually sketch some examples and then let them "play" with the sliders, some little tasks (what happens if you alter..., how do we make this function have a frequency of...) and usually they understand. Now I use the Prime-apps for this.
Arno