Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Drawing the first derivative

Teaching students how to visualise the first derivative in 3B MAT has been problematic over the last two years. This morning I had a bit of a breakthrough in that students weren't looking at me as if I was speaking Alien.

The major difference was that I didn't use the arrow approach. Here's what I did.

I drew a positive cubic on the board and identified the turning points. I identified clearly the x axis and the y axis and identified the coordinates for each TP. I drew their attention to (x,y)

Then I drew a second pair coordinate plane directly underneath and identified/labelled the x axis. I then deliberately (as in made a big song and dance) labelled the other axis y' asking students to think what this might mean.

I then went to the first turning point on the x,y plane and asked students what the gradient was at this point. They said zero straight away.

I then went to the second axis and said coordinates on this plane were (x,y'). Given that the TP we were examining was at (0.25) and y'(0.25) = 0, the coordinate(x,y') that we needed was at (0.25,0). We repeated this for the other turning point.

I then drew vertical dotted lines through both coordinate planes. We then looked at the slope to the left of the TP. Being a cubic (with a positive coefficient of x cubed) the slope was +ve. On the second plane I wrote +ve above the x axis to the left of the TP above the x axis. We then examined the second area and noted the slope was negative (making special note of where the point of inflection was - it wasn't mandated by the course but made sense in the context). I labelled the graph -ve underneath the x axis to the right of the TP. I then wrote +ve in the third area above the x axis.

<- It looked like this.

















Once the areas were labelled it was trivial to join the dots starting where y' was positive (y' at +ve infinity), leading to where y' was negative and then changing direction midway between the x intercepts on y', back towards to the x axis until y' was +ve again (again until y' at +ve infinity). It was also a good time to discuss the type of function produced (eg a concave up quadratic) if you differentiate a cubic with a +ve coefficient of the cubed term and how that related to our y' graph.



















We then repeated the process for a quartic.

yay!

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