In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.
I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).
This student submission comes from my former student Daniel Adkins. His topic, from Precalculus: deriving the double angle formulas for sine, cosine, and tangent.
How does this topic extend what your students should have already learned?
A major factor that simplifies deriving the double angle formulas is recalling the trigonometric identities that help students “skip steps.” This is true especially for the Sum formulas, so a brief review of these formulas in any fashion would help students possibly derive the equations on their own in some cases. Listed below are the formulas that can lead directly to the double angle formulas.
A list of the formulas that students can benefit from recalling:
- Sum Formulas:
- sin(a+b) = sin(a)cos(b) + cos(a)sin(b)
- cos(a+b) = cos(a)cos(b) – sin(a)sin(b)
- tan(a+b) = [tan(a) +tan(b)] / [1-tan(a)tan(b)]
- Pythagorean Identity:
- Sin2 (a) + Cos2(a) = 1
This leads to the next topic, an activity for students to attempt the equation on their own.
How could you as a teacher create an activity or project that involves your topic?
I’m a firm believer that the more often a student can learn something of their own accord, the better off they are. Providing the skeletal structure of the proofs for the double angle formulas of sine, cosine, and tangent might be enough to help students reach the formulas themselves. The major benefit of this is that, even though these are simple proofs, they have a lot of variance on how they may be presented to students and how “hands on” the activity can be.
I have an example worksheet demonstrating this with the first two double angle formulas attached below. This is in extremely hands on format that can be given to students with the formulas needed in the top right corner and the general position where these should be inserted. If needed the instructor could take this a step further and have the different Pythagorean Identities already listed out (I.e. Cos2(a) = 1 – Sin2(a), Sin2(a) = 1 – Cos2(a)) to emphasize that different formats could be needed. This is an extreme that wouldn’t take students any time to reach the conclusions desired. Of course a lot of this information could be dropped to increase the effort needed to reach the conclusion.
A major benefit with this also is that even though they’re simple, students will still feel extremely rewarded from succeeding on this paper on their own, and thus would be more intrinsically motivated towards learning trig identities.
How can Technology be used to effectively engage students with this topic?
When it comes to technology in the classroom, I tend to lean more on the careful side. I know me as a person/instructor, and I know I can get carried away and make a mess of things because there was so much excitement over a new toy to play with. I also know that the technology can often detract from the actual math itself, but when it comes to trigonometry, and basically any form of geometric mathematics, it’s absolutely necessary to have a visual aid, and this is where technology excels.
The Wolfram Company has provided hundreds of widgets for this exact purpose, and below, you’ll find one attached that demonstrates that sin(2a) appears to be equal to its identity 2cos(a)sin(a). This is clearly not a rigorous proof, but it will help students visualize how these formulas interact with each other and how they may be similar. The fact that it isn’t rigorous may even convince students to try to debunk it. If you can make a student just irritated enough that they spend a few minutes trying to find a way to show you that you’re wrong, then you’ve done your job in that you’ve convinced them to try mathematics for a purpose.
After all, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how you begin your classroom, or how you engage your students, what matters is that they are engaged, and are willing to learn.
Wolfram does have a free cdf reader for its demonstrations on this website: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/AVisualProofOfTheDoubleAngleFormulaForSine/
References
Mean Green Math 