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Parabolas
Every radio telescope has the same shape dish. This shape is called a paraboloid, a three dimensional shape formed by rotating a parabola around its axis of symmetry. We have collected some different ways of constructing parabolas:
- using a piece of string, a ruler and a set square [ download doc ] [ download pdf ]
- an investigative way -- using spaghetti! [ download doc ] [ download pdf ]
- using only straight lines -- curve stitching [ download doc ] [ download pdf ]
- by folding paper [ download doc ] [ download pdf ]
...and of course teachers may want to highlight that graphs of quadratic functions are parabolas, too!
