Thursday, January 30, 2014

Challenge your students with Function Carnival

Function Carnival is an interesting website that gives your students a unique set of challenges. I came across this site the other day and after messing around with it, I'm still not sure what, if any, the educational value of it is, besides a thinking challenge, but it might be something you would like to provide with your students if they are looking for a math/science challenge. With Function Carnival, you watch an animation, then try to graph that animation to make it look exactly like the original animation. There are three different challenges: a man getting shot out of a cannon with a parachute, a bumper cars and a ferris wheel. If nothing else, it is a fun challenge to check out. My personal favorite, of the three challenges, is trying to get the bumper car through the other cars without getting in an accident. It's a unique challenge because of all the other cars in your way. It would be a lot easier if those other cars were not there. Too bad the challenge isn't to drive the car through a huge car lot with all the cars mysteriously missing. Yeah, that would be much easier, but "easy" is not the style of Function Carnival.

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