Tuesday, June 2, 2015

An Interactive Version of the Triangle Investigation

In the previous post, I captured movies of my investigation with The Geometer's Sketchpad. Web Sketchpad allows for including an HTML 5 version of the sketch on a webpage, like this one.

Drag the yellow dot, currently on the triangle to trace out the various positions and area of the triangle.

 

Note that I have enforced the maximum side length of 10 in a very strange way. Can you describe what I have done? Can you do it in a similar or better way?

Where do you have to place the yellow dot in order to have an area of 0?

How can you drag the yellow dot to keep the area the same?

What other patterns do you see in the behaviour? (There are lots more in the previous post)

6 comments:

Markus said...

This interactive web sketchpad insert is really great. It would be fantastic if it the web version of sketchpad was available to Ontario teachers.

uptergroveGreg said...

I think it'd be great if there were a version of Web SketchPad available for teachers to use - so much potential!!!

Unknown said...

I agree! A web version of sketchpad would be a real asset to Ontario classrooms. Giving students and teachers the power to create and share web sketches to investigate relationships would be a very powerful tool leading to lots of collaborative mathematical discussions and learning.

David Petro said...

I am curious how you got a version of this to use. When I inquired about it, Daniel Scher at KCP said it wasn't available to sketchpad users. Do you have a beta version?

Ross Isenegger said...

Hi David. Nice to hear from you. I was able to get permission to post web sketches on my blog by virtue of doing some work with McGraw-Hill on their Thrive resource which uses web sketches as part of many lessons. Web Sketchpad is still a pretty new product and there are still Sketchpad features being written into it. Once it is more mature, we can hope that it might be made available to Sketchpad users generally and Ontario licensees specifically.

David Petro said...

Boo that it's not available now but yay that it eventually might be :-)