Polar Project fun

The AP Calculus exam is OVER! My students worked so hard all year long and are all feeling pretty ready to graduate and be done at this point! I always make the Calculus BC final exam open-ended and stress-free since they’ve already put in all the hard work all year for the exam.

This year, their “final exam” is a project, and I’m trying something new! I saw this idea in the “Desmos Educators” Facebook: creating a magnet using a polar graph design created in Desmos. First, students went through the Desmos activity (link below) to review the main types of polar functions and to see what kind of beautiful graphs they can create when they combine those basic polar functions. They had never done this before and were amazed at what kind of results they could come up with!

One of my students asked about shading, and when I showed them that, some of them came up with some neat results.

I also showed them how to create custom colors using a specific code I saw online:

The coolest thing was when a student took the above code and added animation for the individual sliders!! I never would have thought of this, but it made such a hypnotizing result - I think I stared at his animated design for a minute straight! (his butterfly design graph is at the end of the above video).

I made this very open-ended with basically no requirements except to make a beautiful, amazing polar design - they have really impressed me so far with their results! I’m going to print these out in color this weekend (sized to be 2” x 2”) and then students will use a BRUSH to paint on MOD PODGE to stick them to 2” CLEAR GLASS DOMES. Once dry, they will attach MAGNETS to the back to create beautiful polar magnets!

Students will make two magnets (same design printed twice): one to take with them to keep (college dorm fridge décor, anyone?) and one for me to keep on my magnetic whiteboards for future students to admire. Stay tuned for a post on how this turns out. I’ve never used Mod Podge before so this could be interesting…