Soon the Cartesian Plane painted on the bitumen in the school yard will become Basketball courts. Last Wednesday became sunny during Session 3 and Group 81 had completed lots of Maths Pathway modules, I took them outside and got them to line up at the origin of the x- and y-axes. I then used a deck of Multo cards to randomly generate a series of coordinate pairs for the students to each plot in turn until they were all scattered across the positive first quadrant. They did this by first moving along the x-axis to their first number and then moving up to their y number, parallel to the y-axis. 

Once they were familiar with plotting, I got them to line up along the x-axis on a number each. On a white board I wrote and held up y = 2 and they all moved forward as a line. Then I held up y = -3 and they all moved back in a line. Then we stepped it up trying y = x, y= -x and other equations like y= 2x - 4 etc. The students discussed their positioning and helped each other, particularly for those starting on negative x-coordinates. 

We discussed what happened to the student at the y-intercept each time, and we discussed the gradient of our straight lines, particularly when we used fractions for the coefficient of x in our equations. To finish off we tried y = x² and everyone was amazed to see our larger x-coordinate students disappear into the distance, (-10)² = 100 and so on. So, we tried y = ⅕ x² and produced an impressively curved parabola. All this rich learning within just 20 minutes!