When Mathematics Gets Personal
Last year I was introduced to Personal Polynomials over at the Global Math Project through a Facebook post by a fellow educator explaining how she uses this with her calculus students. She asks them to create their own personal polynomial, and then create a graph of its first and second derivatives. Since my goal for this semester was to incorporate Inquiry-Based Learning Techniques into my College Algebra class, I decided to adapt the Personal Polynomial activity for my college algebra students. I considered just assigning the activity for homework, but I decided to take my students to the computer lab…
