This afternoon I taught my College Algebra class about the Conic Sections, and The Double Cone project from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project came to mind. I figured that it deserves a mention since it's the second time this semester that I have used it in my classes when explaning the conic sections. It really seems to help the students visualize where the conic sections are coming from and why they are called conic sections.
In fact, a few students this afternoon stayed after class to dicuss what they saw on the screen and we even looked a few other demonstrations, including the one on Superquadratics. I really appreciated the student's input on what they saw, and a few of them even expressed interest in taking a trigonometry, calculus, or computer programming class.
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