The Wave

Class objective

To understand the concepts involving creating a graph with an independent variable and dependent variable. To familiarize students with the concepts of line, points on a line, plotting a line, and slope.

Arizona Adult Education Standard

ABEII, III, and ASEI Indicator C: Applies algebraic concepts and methods to explore, analyze, or solve real-life problems.

Materials

Blue wave sheet for each student

2 Sets of slope, line, and t-charts for groups of students to arrange

Activity

Ask all the class to participate in doing the “wave”. Begin by drawing a t-chart on the board like the one on the Wave sheet. Ask one person to do the wave, and then write down how many seconds it took for him/her to do so. Then continue adding people one by one until you have the entire class doing the wave. Now you should have a list of # of people from 1-total of class on the left side and a total of seconds it took for each wave on the right. If you have a large class, you can add more than one student at a time.

Now have the students figure out how to graph the # of students on one side and # of seconds on the other. This activity is a great learning experience for students to decide what intervals to create for each variable.

Next we plot points on the graph for each point created by the combination of x & y results on the wave graph. Draw a line that best represents these points. Now the class can have a discussion about what slope this line represents.

Finally take the cards and have the student groups match the slope cards with the line cards they represent. Also, match the x & y t-charts. It doesn’t matter which the class begins with, as long as each group can correctly identify which line goes with the slope and t-chart.