The Most Beautiful Math I Have Ever Seen

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There’s something that is just amazing about this graph.  I love it.  It’s perfectly, slightly asymmetrical.  It is deep and detailed and simply beautiful.  And my student made it which makes even more awesome.

For those of you unaware, this is a product of Sam Shah’s Families of Curves project that I shamelessly stole for my algebra II students.  This piece was created with the function:

The parameter, k, varied on the interval [-7, 7] with steps of 0.25.  The window dimensions are approximately [-3.5, 3.5] in the x direction and [-120, 120] in the y direction.

I’m printing this out as a poster to hang in my room and will be giving the artist a print of their own.  I can’t wait to do this project again next year to add to what will become quite the mathematical art collection!

Tomorrow I’ll post a few of the other amazing pieces my students came up with!

Exponent Properties, As Explained By Star Wars Characters

Knocks it out of the park, my student does:

Seriously, I am suspending my “over 100% is not a possible grade” rule of thumb.  This was all hand-illustrated and some of the color/sharpness did not survive the scanning/jpg-ifying process.  Plus, the cover page has been omitted to keep the student’s name off the Intertubes. I was totally blown away.

I like my timing of this project: Instead of having a test on the exponent properties, we’re doing a project since half of my class is missing this week to a yearly field trip.  However, despite how amazed I am by this student, I wonder: Can she use all these exponent rules?  On its face, this is an awesome alternative assessment, but am I really assessing my students aptitude with exponent properties?  (Clearly, there are mistakes in there, though more of the mismatching examples variety).  Right now I don’t really care – this is awesome, different, and there’s something to be said for holding students accountable to project specifications (see below) and deadlines in addition to cranking out math problems.  But I will let that thought/worry creep into our future assessments, just to make sure.

The project outline and rubric for those who are interested (note: heavily borrowed from an Internet source that I’m struggling to find at the moment. Update hopefully forthcoming):

Exponent Review Project