The project that I'm referring to is my Polynomials Photo Project using Geogebra (I first talked about it here). The basic gist (jist?) of the problem was that the kids were to take an original picture (not from the internet, anyway) and fit a polynomial to it. At the time we were talking degrees, end behavior, zeros, etc. Then they were to upload the picture to geogebra, plot some points on it, and find a polynomial to fit. These are the requirements that I gave the kids. That all worked fine and the kids had a good time with it.
The problems that we ran into were when it came time to turn it in. I wanted both a hard copy (I posted some on the wall in my room just in time for my former-art-teacher-now-assistant-principal to come to my room this week to observe - score!) and an electronic copy. Geogebra has a wiki on their website where you can set up an account and upload files to it that I thought we'd take advantage of. I didn't want all the kids to have to set one up, so I made an account and a folder then gave the kids the username and password to it so they could upload their projects. The majority of uploads were problem-free, but some kids just couldn't get it to work; I don't know if there's some sort of storage limit or what, but I tried for them, too, and couldn't get some files to upload. It really ended up being a hassle - I told some kids not to worry about it after they'd tried and tried but then forgot I told them and docked them points. Some kids got frustrated and then had to have their hands held through the process. Yuck. I'm thinking that when I do this again (and I'd like to do it in Algebra 2 next semester) I'll just tell the kids to e-mail me a copy of their word document that they're pasting their picture, equation, and caption on. Keeping track of the e-mails will probably be easier.
Without further ado, here are several of my favorites.
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| My #1 favorite. This was a door in this kid's house. I wonder if he's ever seen it mathematically before? |
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| I've never really liked hostas before. Maybe now I will. |
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| A picture of the Taj Mahal from a family vacation. I wouldn't have thought it was an original picture unless I saw the date stamp in the corner. |
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| This one I just thought was super cool. |
One of the neatest things about this project was that I really learned a lot about my students. One girl took a picture of a horse at her mom's farm - who would've known? One boy had a picture of himself riding a dirt bike... I saw a lot of travel pictures... several of Niagara Falls.... one of her mom's "frog obsession".
The other neatest thing was that my kids started looking around and seeing math in things they look at every day. I've done my job.
