Playing with Functions

Comparing graphs of linear equations can be really helpful in trying to understand them, but just trying to graph them takes a really long time. Fortunately for us, someone out there wrote a Java applet (a simple program) just for us, called Slope Slider. The whole concept is that you can push the colored sliders left and right to easily change the slope and y-intercept.

The big questions to think about are:

• What happens to the slope when it's greater than 1 and getting bigger?
• What about the slope between 0 and 1?
• How different are the lines with slopes +10 and -10? What about +100 and -100?

[Note: When you're done with the "Slope Slider" check out this other applet that graphs functions for you. Typing in the function can be a little bit funky, since you have to use an asterisk (*) to do multiplication and a caret (^) to show that what follows is an exponent, but it can graph almost any function you want.]