Unit Circle Practice

Sam Shah's applet for practicing finding special angles on the unit circle and their sines and cosines

Evaluating Inverse Trig Expressions

I created this applet on GeoGebraTube to help students practice evaluating inverse trig functions of special angles by visualizing both the unit circle and the graph of the inverse trig function.

Radian measure practice

This is one of the simpler of a huge number of elegant GeoGebra creations from Daniel Mentrard. (Those available in HTML rather than Java are here.) You're given an angle which is some integer multiple of pi/12 and asked to place it on the appropriate place on a circle. You then push the test button to see if you've placed it correctly. You can choose between "Stage 1" and "Stage 2" problems. Stage 1 has only positive angles. Stage 2 includes negative angles.

Visualizing Radian Measure

Ted Coe's Unwrapping a Circle applet on GeoGebra Tube is a visually powerful way of demonstrating what a radian is. I've also posted a slight modification of the applet optimized for use as a demonstration.

Spinning Out Sine and Cosine

A nice animation from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project showing the relationship between a circle and the graphs of sine and cosine. I like the way the cosine graph is show on its side. I'm going to try using it (after editing it in Mathematica to remove the sine and cosine labels) as an introduction both to the unit circle and the trig graphs. It looks like a good candidate for the technique of showing an animation with no commentary and then asking for student questions, writing them on the board, and asking for answers to/discussion of any of the questions.

Introduction to the Unit Circle

These are three versions of an applet that I created using GeoGebra to introduce students to the unit circle. One version presents the idea in terms of distance traveled around the circle. The other two present the idea in terms of the measure of the central angle. There is a radian version and a degree version.