Showing posts with label functions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label functions. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Drawing the first derivative

Teaching students how to visualise the first derivative in 3B MAT has been problematic over the last two years. This morning I had a bit of a breakthrough in that students weren't looking at me as if I was speaking Alien.

The major difference was that I didn't use the arrow approach. Here's what I did.

I drew a positive cubic on the board and identified the turning points. I identified clearly the x axis and the y axis and identified the coordinates for each TP. I drew their attention to (x,y)

Then I drew a second pair coordinate plane directly underneath and identified/labelled the x axis. I then deliberately (as in made a big song and dance) labelled the other axis y' asking students to think what this might mean.

I then went to the first turning point on the x,y plane and asked students what the gradient was at this point. They said zero straight away.

I then went to the second axis and said coordinates on this plane were (x,y'). Given that the TP we were examining was at (0.25) and y'(0.25) = 0, the coordinate(x,y') that we needed was at (0.25,0). We repeated this for the other turning point.

I then drew vertical dotted lines through both coordinate planes. We then looked at the slope to the left of the TP. Being a cubic (with a positive coefficient of x cubed) the slope was +ve. On the second plane I wrote +ve above the x axis to the left of the TP above the x axis. We then examined the second area and noted the slope was negative (making special note of where the point of inflection was - it wasn't mandated by the course but made sense in the context). I labelled the graph -ve underneath the x axis to the right of the TP. I then wrote +ve in the third area above the x axis.

<- It looked like this.

















Once the areas were labelled it was trivial to join the dots starting where y' was positive (y' at +ve infinity), leading to where y' was negative and then changing direction midway between the x intercepts on y', back towards to the x axis until y' was +ve again (again until y' at +ve infinity). It was also a good time to discuss the type of function produced (eg a concave up quadratic) if you differentiate a cubic with a +ve coefficient of the cubed term and how that related to our y' graph.



















We then repeated the process for a quartic.

yay!