Activity Overview
This lesson involves providing opportunities for students to explore and make sense of the graphs of the cotangent, secant, and cosecant functions.
Objectives
- Students will identify the values of cotangent, secant and cosecant for various values of θ from the unit circle.
- Students will understand the correspondence of the graphs of cotangent, secant and cosecant to the unit circle.
- Students will identify and explain features of the graphs of cotangent, secant, and cosecant, where the functions are undefined, or where they have intercepts.
Vocabulary
- sine
- cosine
- cotangent
- secant
- cosecant
- unit circle
About the Lesson
This lesson involves providing opportunities for students to explore and make sense of the graphs of the cotangent, secant, and cosecant functions.
As a result, students will:
- Use sliders to move a point around the unit circle, observing the changes in function values for cotangent, secant, and cosecant, and observing the connections to the graphs of each of the three functions.
- Make and test conjectures about the graphs of the cotangent, secant, and cosecant functions based on observations from the unit circle.