Discovering Sine, Cosine, and Tangent in Right Triangles

Students manipulate the angle measures (in intervals of 10 degrees) of a right triangle whose hypotenuse is 10 units. Hopefully, through careful observation and recording, they will discover the ratios that define the three basic trig functions. Then students can manipulate the size of the triangle to discover that these ratios are independent of the triangle's size, and are therefore, useful mathematical constants. SOHCAHTOA can follow, but it shouldn't lead. Lessons: http://bit.ly/1nT7h0t and http://bit.ly/1b1Jatx
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Jennifer Silverman —

 
Resource Type
Activity
Tags
exploration  trigonometric-functions 
Target Group (Age)
15 – 18
Language
English (United States)
 
 
Views
55635
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License
CC-BY-SA, GeoGebra Terms of Use
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