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In this lesson, students use the unit circle as a starting point for thinking about circular motion and then scale their results appropriately to clocks of different sizes by leveraging the similarity between the circles (MP7). Next, students scale and translate the values from the unit circle to a Ferris wheel whose center is not at . Students find the coordinates of points on these circles algebraically and then consider what they represent in context (MP2). They also consider the difference between approximating the coordinates and representing them exactly as expressions using cosine and sine.
It may be helpful for some students to have extra copies of the gridded clock faces. Consider using the blackline master to print and make extras available.
For the digital version of the activity, acquire devices that can run the applet.