Ryan's Store

Within a real world context (a city manager trying to plan shorter roads) students will produce diagrams of right triangles with rulers and find the relationship between the sides of the triangles. By the end of the lesson, students should see that the sum of the squares of the legs is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. Further, they should be able to produce the Pythagorean Theorem through class discussion. A teacher's guide is included.

Proof can be difficult to help students understand, but this activity walks them through two separate proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem, both of which are simple yet elegant. Students should experience success with proving the Pythagorean Theorem, a target that can be tough to accomplish!

In each problem, students are given one of the following representations: Ordered Pairs, Graph, Table, or Mapping. They then are asked to produce each of the remaining three representations from the given information. This worksheet has greatly helped my students understand the connections between the four representations, and well as be able to analyze and interpret each representation when they see it.