The Line of Best Fit

I remember when I first started teaching 4 years ago, there were several topics that I just didn't feel like I was adequately prepared to teach.  Statistics was one of those topics, but especially Line of Best Fit.

Fast forward 4 years--- I LOVE STATS!! Seriously--we have the best time in my class during the time that we are learning about Statistics because I quickly figured out how much fun it could be.  I spent some time with our AP Statistics teacher and learned so much about Statistics!

In my Algebra 1B Class, we are about to start working on Linear Regression. As I was planning this unit with my intern, I ran across an activity that I have done before with TI-Nspires, but we don't have TI-Nspires in my classroom.

The basic idea in the activity is to look at a scatter plot, try to guess a "Line of Best Fit" using a movable line and its residuals to try and approximate the line of best fit.  Once you feel like you have a solid guess--compare it to the actual Regression Line, interpret, and make predictions.  So, in trying to figure out a way to modify this awesome activity, I remembered something I stumbled across in Grad School at Auburn--> Desmos Activity Builder!

If you've never looked at teacher.demos.com you definitely should!! It is SO awesome! You can search by topic to see if another teacher or Desmos has already created an activity OR you can create your own and share it with other teachers! Such a great technology resource.

I spent several days working on this between the rough draft, sending it to another teacher for feedback and the revised activity, but I think it will be well worth my time!

Here is the teacher link to my activity: https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/563a42fb60dded490a7f410d

I made a handout for my students so that they would have a reference sheet to remember what we discovered after the activity is complete.  


I welcome any and all feedback you may have on this! I am always looking to improve activities for my students!