I decided that this year I was going to make trigonometric modelling a little easier for my students. I've used Kate Noak's Moon Safari in the past but I found that something was lost using a graphing calculator. The process of entering the data is time consuming and causes some students to get turned off the activity before they managed to get to the good stuff. This year I decided to give Desmos a try.
I entered the data into a Google spreadsheet that I made public. I gave students Chromebooks and had them open the spreadsheet. They copied the data from the spreadsheet, then pasted it into Desmos (yup just two steps) and then got to work trying to determine the equation that best modelled the situation. I really liked that they could see the graph as they modified the equation and see the coefficient of determination to help them determine if one equation was better than another. When they were done they could get Desmos to do the regression to see how close they were.
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