Snoring Pigs: Graphing Sine and Cosine

This project is pretty fun and I've been using it for about 20 years and I have no idea who should get credit for the idea. But like everything else this year, it got a reboot. We converted it into a Desmos project and, quite frankly, I have no idea why we didn't do this years ago!

Here's the breakdown. There's a farmer and his pigs. The farmer's wife is convinced that her husband is just taking naps all day instead of working so she records his snoring and compares it the pigs' snoring. She does this by using trig... of course!

Each student will have slightly different equations of snores because the periods of the two functions (Brian and the pigs) are based on the cell phone number of the student. It is a little confusing at first, so I spent some time working on the set up with my kiddos. Once they had their graphs figured out, it was smooth sailing.

After graphing the snores with sinusoidal functions, the students must then compare the two graphs and decide any similarities and differences. Basically, they must answer the question, "Does Brian snore like a pig?".

One more thing, I had the students give a shoutout to one of their teachers (old or new) and I'm sending their individual responses to the teacher they love. This part is pretty cool.

Continue snorting!

The Desmos activity is located here.

Comments

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