Teaching graphing points on the coordinate plane can seem rather dry and academic. This lesson plan makes use of a fun interactive tutorial and game that shows why coordinates are useful, shows how they work, and provides a fun game to practice picking the correct coordinates.
Objectives
Students
will learn why coordinates are useful and how to plot coordinates on an xy coordinate plane.
This lesson can be completed in a computer lab setting; or you might introduce the lesson and have students cycle into your classroom computer center to use the activity.
Introduce students to Graph Mole. They can click on the Introduction; the fun, interactive story and tutorial will teach students why coordinates are useful and how they work.
Upon completion of the tutorial, students can play the Easy version of Graph Mole; as they play, the must identify which coordinate the mole is at before he can eat all the vegetables.
When students have mastered the Easy version, they can progress to the Medium and Hard versions of Graph Mole for additional practice and fluency in graphing points.
Assessment
The easiest way to assess student learning is to simply ask them to show you the final screen for each version. Here is a scoring/assessment guide:
Easy version -- Maximum score is 5000 points if every question is answered
perfectly. A score of 4000 or more means they have mastered this version.
Medium version -- Students should be able to complete the game and get to the final screen. Any score here is fine; as long as they can get to the final screen, they have a satisfactory mastery of the material. Maximum score is 6000 points.
Hard version -- If a student can get to the final screen in the Hard version, that's quite an achievement; it shows excellent mastery of the material. Maximum score is 10000 points.
Graph Mole