Opportunity for departmental collaborative planning:

Print off and work through the Teacher Guide together while working on the Desmos activity to plan the best way to use the lesson.

Students watch several pictures of a player shooting a basketball at a hoop. Each picture ends when the ball reaches its maximum height. Students guess whether or not the ball goes in for each shot. This leads to the question, “Is there a graph that models the path of a basketball?” Students try modeling that relationship with lines, which fail, and then with parabolas. The conclusion is that while lines used to be adequate for the mathematical modeling we do in our world (Basketball jerseys, Freya and Polly’s rowing boats), we need a new function type if we want to describe new relationships.

Objective	To use a quadratic curve to model a basketball shot
Resources	You will need to book a computer room or laptops. Desmos – Will it hit the hoop?