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Re: [seul-edu] Graphing games
Jan,
Thanks for the suggestion. I
hadn't thought of a drawing program. I have GIMP, but haven't heard of sketch.
Any idea where I can download it?
Thanks,
On Wed, Dec 06, 2000 at 10:07:44PM -0600,
Dave Prentice wrote:
>
> To
all,
>
> I have some really slow
freshmen who have a hard time in algebra
> class
connecting ordered pairs with points on a Cartesian
coordinate
> system.
Gee, that sure sounds
familiar.
> Does anybody know of a game that
helps teach coordinate
> graphing? I was thinking of
something like Battleship that would
> require you
to specify ordered pairs instead of A4, B6, etc.. It
would
> be nice too if they could play either
against the computer or else
> against each other
from different computers.
I don't know about any such game (well,
there is matritsa, but that
wouldn't work, it's for little kids, and I
think even most kids would
find it rather boring. And it's not
really finished, either.), but one
thing you could try is to use a
drawing program. Both gimp and sketch
have rulers on the sides of
theirs canvases. Sketch is better because
its coordinate system is
like standard Cartesian system, with the origin
in the lower left corner
of a page, so x increases to the right, and y
increases up. Gimp
has the origin in the upper left corner, and y
increases down, so it
could confuse them rather than help. Gimp has
little marks on the
rulers which are synchronized with the cursor.
Sketch does not have
markers like that, but you can turn on crosshair
cursor. Both programs
show the coordinates of the cursor on their status
bars.
What you
can do is give your students an encoded picture, something like
this:
polyline:
(10,10)->(10,20)->(20,20)->(20,10)->(10,10)
polyline:
(10,20)->(15,25)->(20,20)
They would have to plot the polylines
(you would have to show them how
to do that with sketch or gimp) defined
by the given points, and get a
picture of a house. Of course you
could do something more exciting than
a house.
They can see the
coordinates on the rulers, and in addition to that also
on the status
bar, so they would have a lot of quick feedback.
Later you could even
add some other objects, like
circle: center (3,5), radius 2
It
would probably be possible to write a python script for sketch that
would
take a simple picture and generate the instructions automatically.
--
Jan
Hlavacek
(219) 434-7566
Department of
Mathematics
Jhlavacek@sf.edu
University of
Saint
Francis
http://www.sf.edu/jhlavacek/