, 1 min read
Using vegetables as learning objects
Tall, Dark, and Mysterious talks about Vegetables of revolution:
Well, I continued, You have a function, like say this one – at this I traced an outline of the squash with my index finger – you rotate it around the x-axis, so it traces out a three-dimensional shape, like this squash. I turned the squash in my hand, and said, That’s what I said before, “symmetric vegetables”. This one is perfectly even, see? – turn it around and it doesn’t wobble. Same with this carrot.
At this his eyes widened. Oh, yeah! he exclaimed. Cool! I remember that stuff now. He paused, and then said, less confidently, Well, kind of. He thought about it for a moment again, and then added, Probably would remember more if we’d used vegetables.
That’s it. Next time I have to teach about volumes of revolution, I’ll use vegetables.