Tangent Circles - Assignment 7
April Kennedy
Technology: An Advantage? After
working with the exploration, "Given two circles and a point
on one of the circles, construct a circle tangent to the two circles
with one pont of tangency being the designated point", the
benefit of using technology to "see" the investigation
became clear. Once the tangent circle is created, the true investigation
of where certain loci lie can begin to be discussed
For example, consider the locus of the center of all tangent circles to two given circles. How many constructions would one have to do by pencil and paper to see the emergence of the locus? How long does it take for one to see this path using Geometer's Sketchpad? Not very long! Click here for a demonstration. We are able to animate around the circle and trace the locus of the center. One will see that the path the locus follows is an ellipse with foci at the centers of the given circles.
Using Geometer's
Sketchpad, we are able to look at other cases of this same problem.
For instance, ,what if the two given circles intersect? How many
different circles are there that will be tangent to these two
given circles? There are enough that it would take you quite some
time to find the locus of the tangent circles on pencil and paper.
However, using the animation and trace feature of Geometer's Sketchpad,
we can see quite easily that the locus is the hyperbola with foci
at the centers of the given circles. This does not prove the statement,
but students have an understanding of it and know that it is true.
This investigation took a shorter amount of time than if it had
been done on pencil and paper and the students are able to investigate
even more. Technology: an advantage? I think so!
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