About the Activity: Before completing this activity, students should have been introduced to the Unit Circle. I suggest that in the day prior, students should construct the Unit Circle using an activity similar to the one found at this link. In this activity, students will discover the Sine curve using the points on the Unit Circle. This activity can also be used to discover the Cosine curve (how this activity can be adapted to discover the Cosine curve can be found in the PowerPoint) . Not sure how you might do this with spaghetti? Click the buttons below to download the worksheet and/or the PowerPoint to find out!
Reflection: After doing this activity, I would change a few things:
Before beginning this activity, ask students to predict what the Sine curve and the Cosine curve will look like.
Linguini would be much easier to use than spaghetti.
Have half the class find the Sine curve and the other half find the Cosine curve. Then, have students compare the curves through group discussions.
Overall, I really enjoyed doing this activity with the class. The class was very engaged in the activity. Students were intrigued to see how we were going to discover the Sine curve using spaghetti. The students were having fun while making connections between the unit circle and the trigonometric functions.