Since have time in class to interact, I've been pushing my students to do work way above our 8th Grade Algebra 1 pay grade. And they've been kicking ass! We finished our unit on Quadratics just before spring break and I decided to kind of take a time out to do some extension activities. One that I thought would be good is finding the equation of a parabola from 3 points (solving a system of three equations with three unknowns).
We did systems of two equations earlier in the year so I started them off with a few that only had two variables to find; when you plugged one of the points into the standard form of a quadratic, you immediately found the "b" or "c" value. Once my students felt competent, we worked together on solving a system of three equations. Then they were on their own and they did amazingly.
My students thought it was pretty awesome that with only three pieces of information, you could find an entire equation. After they slaved over their work I told them to break out the graphing calculators and we found the quadratic regression program to check our answers : )
Have I told you how much I love flipping??
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