Objectives: For students to discover that none of our current functions model periodic data well and to introduce them to periodic functions.
Preliminaries/Lead-In:
Suggested Procedures: I will let the students get started on this pretty independently. The first plot they do of the data will not look periodic, so they might decide that this data could be well modeled by a parabola. After 3 however they should have revised that opinion after extending the graph for another year - this should help build both the idea of a periodic graph and also what causes data to be periodic. I will probably work through 4 as a class.
Wrap-Up/Take-Away:
Possible Homework:
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