Education Technology


Graphing Pictures

Activity Overview

Students will draw a picture on a coordinate plane using approximately 50 - 75 ordered pairs. They will plot these points on a graphing calculator and display the pictures using the TI-Navigator.

Before the Activity

The students are to draw a "dot-to-dot" picture using 50 - 75 ordered pairs. The picture should include points in all four quadrants. The picture must contain at most two separate starting points. The students usually take at least a class period to draw their picture and verify the points.

During the Activity

When the students have verified that, by connecting the points in the specified order, the correct picture is drawn, they should enter the first line of points in L1 (the x-coordinate), and L2 (the y-coordinate).
If there are two separate starting points for the picture (2 distinct lines), the second set of points should be entered in L3 (x-coordinate) and L4 (y-coordinate).
The students will then make scatter plots by turning "PLOT 1" and "PLOT 2" on. The values for PLOT1 will be L1, L2 and the values for PLOT2 will be L3,L4.

After the Activity

When these points are graphed, the student's pictures should be recreated on the calculator screen. By using the "Screen Capture" feature on the TI-Navigator, each students work can be saved by the teacher as well as displayed on the screen for the entire class to see.