Monday, November 30, 2009

A library of functions: Functions and their graphs

These activities were taken from the review chapter in the Calculus book that is the successor of this course's Precalculus book. In addition to the kinds of functions explored in Chapter 9: Polynomial and Rational Functions, a review of functions explored earlier in the course (e.g., sinusoidal functions) are also explored.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Power, polynomial and rational functions

This week's handout reviews the fundamental aspects of these three types of function, and polynomial and rational functions are seen as combinations of other functions.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Compositions, Inverses, and Translations of Functions

If the course had proceeded from a function-based approach, the concepts in Chapter 8 would have appeared in Chapter 1. That would have been helpful to students so that they could see patterns across the ways we act on functions. Although that's not the case, students have seen some of the techniques covered in this chapter in the earlier chapters. Perhaps this is an attempt to "draw things together."

Download the problem set here.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Applying a few of the trig identities

These 3 problems are interesting demonstrations of the usefulness of trig identities. Even better, the paths to the solutions are interesting and the solutions themselves are surprising.

Have fun.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Week 9: Using trig identities to solve trig equations

This is the week before test 2, so the session could be about preparation in terms of getting homework and other questions answered.

We'll also use trig functions and their inverses and their domains and ranges, along with trig identities, to solve trig equations.

This handout provides students with the trig identities they'll need to know, along with 10 practice problems. We'll solve these problems in ways that draw on the relevant concepts in order for a richer, broader exam prep experience.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Week 8: Sinusoidal functions (cont.) plus...

Meetings were cancelled for three of the five groups last week, so we'll complete the activities with groups who haven't done so.

Then we'll try this problem. It's about developing a sinusoidal function to match a given graph. The answer is in the first comment below.

There were also 2 problems from the text that we didn't get to from Week 7, which should be suitable for some good, productive groupwork. Let's see how those work out.

Expect a 10-minute warm-up of questions to be solved using the unit circle.