I’d like to do for Quadratics what we did with Pythagorean’s Theorem. I put out the call on Pythagorean’s Theorem and had come up with several ideas, only a couple of which were by me.
So I’m putting up the bat signal again. Except in this case it’s the quadratic formula signal and asking for your help. Please comment, email, or tweet me ideas, resources, youtube videos, or stuff you’ve done.
So far here’s some stuff I thought up.
- Cars crashing – use quadratics and the acceleration formula to determine who’s at fault.
- Remote control cars accelerating and decelerating. Plot and find the acceleration and deceleration of the cars. (should be a quadratic)
- NFL punts. Find a nice video of an NFL punt with good hangtime and do some stuff with it.
- Related: let’s get a punter to nail the giant TV in the new Cowboys stadium.
Until then, here’s a post by Dan Meyer on quadratics that is way, way more interesting than anything I’ll do (here’s the how-to).
emergent math 
1. neat article from Wired online that uses free video analysis software to debunk a viral video
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/can-you-survive-a-jump-from-a-building/
2. Ever ask the question dealing with something being thrown off of a cliff? Well Jamie Pierre jumped off one to stupidly set a record
Then a couple years later Fred Syverson did it on accident and set a new record
These videos can be used along with quadratics to model data or determine the speed an object is traveling when it hits the ground.
3. Extreme sports buffs will have seen pictures like this one of Robbie Maddison that show nice parabolic arcs. Import them into Geometer’s Sketchpad or Geogebra for analysis
Awesome! Great stuff David! I’ll check those out and probably re-post.