A short followup to the post Two Ideas for Introducing Functions.
Yesterday I discovered another payoff from the hilariously gruesome Meat-a-Morphosis video: a powerful and memorable analogy for Inverse Functions. Imagine if we ran the machine backwards - if we put chicken nuggets in and the original chickens came out? My students thought this was hilarious.
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| Inverse Functions: What if you put in nuggets and out came chickens? Image adapted from original at Meat-a-Morphosis ( Patty Hill & Michael Word) |
Even more fun: for students still coming to terms with f(x) notation, faced with this:
doesn't this convey the same idea even more clearly?
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| Put a chicken into the nuggetiser, then into the de-nuggetiser and you get back your chicken (OK , maybe with few ruffled feathers and a lot of squawking!) |
Who would have thought there was so much laughter in a lesson on functions? Thanks to the Meat-a-Morphosis team at Kealing Middle School, Austin Texas for a wondeful teaching resource.
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