Marble Paint Rolls and the Graphing Calculator

Students were put in random groups of three and were required to practise marble rolls until they could create a function with opposite end behaviour ( a cubic) and a function with the same end behaviour ( a quartic). Once they mastered it they put paint on their marble and made two marble paint rolls. Once it dried they went over it with a marker. They look like this.

 

 

 

Once students had there paint rolls they were to use the graphing calculator to generate the equation of best fit (cubics and quartics). Using the graphing calculator students were then able to get all the characteristics of these polynomials. I asked them to put one of the sets of characteristics on their groups chart paper. Here are some samples.

 

 

I spent some time demonstrating different buttons on the graphing calculator. Here is a snapshot of a quartic on the graphing calculator. And some other notes about end behaviour and the number of roots of both cubic and quartic functions.