Everyone Loves Buried Treasure

I just love when this role as learning coach gives me a full circle moment. I am in a coaching cycle with the Precalculus teacher at my school, who was also my student teacher in 2020! Getting to work with her again and nerd out about precalculus together fills my bucket in a BIG way. She is full of excitement and energy and brings so much light and enthusiasm to the Pre-Calculus content. 

She reached out about the polar coordinate unit and wanted a thinking partner to find new and engaging ways to spice things up this unit.

For our first standard, students need to understand how to graph in the polar coordinate system and convert between polar and rectangular coordinates. Graphing the actual polar coordinate is just a fairly quick, 1-2 day topic so we thought we would kick off the unit with a little fun and play a pirate themed version of battleship. 

Students created their game board by placing a total of 32 treasures and traps on their blank polar coordinate plane:

Their game boards should look something like this:

Students didn't have to draw the symbols but just used colored pencils to color code where their treasures and traps were located. To practice writing the polar coordinates, students completed their "Captain's Chart".

Once the treasures and traps were placed and documented the game essentially functions like Battleship. Students partner up, guess a coordinate, and ask their parter if anything is positioned at that location. They keep track of their wins and loses along the way. 

We mixed things up partway through the game by announcing a new rule:

• Only guesses with negative r-values and/or negative θ-values may be used! Listen for directions!
• This means you must think carefully about your guesses and adjust your strategy!

This game could easily be adapted for the coordinate plan as well. The goal is to have students practice writing the coordinates from a point and then practicing finding that location after being given a set of coordinates. They are getting practice in both directions, working with a partner, and finding a little fun while getting in that repetitive practice that we know is so crucial in mathematics. 

I often think about what this would look like as a worksheet. Here's a point. Graph it. Here's a graph. What's the point? It's the same thing. But there's something about the fear of a Kraken that hooks students in and makes the monotonous act of graphing polar coordinates a little more engaging.