Graphing Telephone

 Do you remember the old game of telephone? Someone whispers something to the person next to them and the words get twisted and distorted as they travel from person to person around the circle. The last person shares the phrase they think they heard, and usually everyone shares a chuckle at how ridiculous it ended up. 

A colleague of mine I was working with in my current role as the school's learning coach had the brilliant idea of taking this concept and applying it to graphing functions. We worked together to plan it out and the result was a challenging, and somewhat hilarious, game of graphing telephone! 

For this version, students were grouped into groups of 5. Each person had a little booklet that contained the following pages, with their own unique start card.

Students graphed their function from page 1 on the graph on page 2. Then, once everyone in the circle was ready, they passed their booklet with the graph page showing to the next person in the circle. That student could only look at the graph and use it to write the equation on the next page. They passed it on, where the next person tried to graph it based on the equation. The goal was for the graph at the end to match the original equation. 

Five booklets were passed around the circle and I think the best group all day only had 3 booklets that matched from start to finish. The best and most powerful learning part of the day occurred in the conversations that happened after. Where did we go wrong? What happened? Was it "just" a negative?  How did our absolute value graph turn into a parabola? Such fantastic opportunities to do some error analysis in a really authentic way!

 

Here is an example of a booklet that made it all the way through correctly!

It's always a great day to get students practicing a new skill in a novel way!