Happy Valentine’s Day or Valentine Weekend, however you may ‘celebrate’! I thought this might be a fun post to inspire some creativity in your students by challenging them to come up with a way to use their graphing calculator or their web-based dynamic math tool (i.e. ClassPad.net!) to create a heart.
I’ve always loved doing creative things with my students around holidays and ‘significant’ days, like Valentine’s, St. Patrick’s Day, Pi Day, etc. It allowed my students to apply some of the mathematics they have been using in fun and artistic ways. When I taught Geometry, we made Valentine Cards and Poems using our geometric shapes and words. They were hilarious and so clever. From the two examples I have here, you have to admit, they were incredibly clever with their math vocabulary!
This is going to be a short post with just a quick video to give you one idea for creating a heart with a graphing calculator using inequalities. I am using just one possible pair of inequalities - this is where the fun and creativity comes in. Depending on the age of your students and the math they’ve been exposed to, they can come up with multiple ways to graph a heart. It doesn’t have to be inequalities (which are being used for the shading aspect) - could be piecewise functions, or parametric, or trig or even simple linear and quadratics. That’s the beauty - challenge your students to come up with different ways to graph a heart (could be plotted point for younger students that you connect).
Here are the inequalities I am using:
You will see in the video that I am graphing on the fx-9750GIII graphing calculator, so my heart shades in black (but that doesn’t mean we have a black heart!). If you have the fx-CG50 grapher, you can make it in color. I also show you how to use the scientific calculator, the fx-991CW, and the QR code to see the graph (wow!), and of course, the ClassPad.net workspace to graph and play around a bit more - so many options if you use the emulators and the ClassPad.net workspace!
Have fun creating!
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