Introducing Differentiation
Dear Mathletes, Today I want to share with you some discovery maths. It is very tempting for teachers to just begin with the power rule of differentiation and express how simple this is to students. But actually this is robbing them of an opportunity to discover it for themselves and, in the process, develop their analytical skills. Using the graphing software of Geogebra, students can find the gradient at different points on the graph using the tangent line function. If students just focus on quadratic functions to begin with they can use their knowledge of linear sequences to generate the gradient functions. They can then use this in order to make predictions for cubic graphs and other types of non-linear functions. This is a great topic to allow students to explore and get them to develop not only their mathematics but also their learning skills. Please try! Mr Mathlete