Parabolas Are Everywhere!
Anything to make math a little more fun and less intimidating!
High School Math Teacher Luci Cedrone challenged her Algebra 2 students to find parabolas in the world around them and do the calculations elsewhere for the parabolas/ quadratic equations. Pretty amazing how many there are and the places they “hide.”
For the Angry Birds project (remember the app/video game where pigs steal the bird's eggs and the birds plot revenge?), she gave her students several representations for quadratic equations (lists of points on a coordinate plane, given equation, or a flight path with just start and end points and vertex, etc.) for each bird and coordinate points for two pigs. Students had to map out where the birds flew and which birds hit which pigs.
