Find Your Fit – Calculus
Many concepts in Calculus can be exemplified through real-world phenomena. I found that the discipline-specific repository from University of Colorado to be an excellent source of visuals, simulations, and games for displaying these concepts. Listed below are three that I particularly liked:
- The Projectile Motion intro allows us to trace the flightpath of any projectile while varying things like angle of launch, height of launch, etc. and see how the flightpath can be modelled with the graph of a quadratic equation. Found at https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/projectile-motion/latest/projectile-motion_en.html
- The Moving Man is a great way to visualize the differences between position, velocity, and acceleration, found at https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/cheerpj/moving-man/latest/moving-man.html?simulation=moving-man
- While the last one isn’t explicitly a calculus concept, using the unit circle definition of trigonometry is a crucial skill to have in doing calculations with calculus. This interactive simulation is excellent for students to be able to play around with angles in standard position in both radians and degrees, seeing their values when evaluated by a trig function, and seeing how that relates to the graph of the corresponding trig function. Found at https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/trig-tour/latest/trig-tour_en.html
Example for "Find Your Fit – Calculus":
https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/projectile-motion/latest/projectile-motion_en.html