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Thursday, 15 October 2015

Geometer's Sketchpad - Practice Line of Best Fit

When using the Geometer's Sketchpad it is often better to "start from sketch, not from scratch". That is, give students a premade sketch rather having them build something from nothing (as many textbooks would have you do).
In this activity, students practice placing the line of best fit on a linear set of data. It's not meant to be really difficult but just to reenforce the idea of what the line of best fit is. Students can check their answer and try as many as they like. Clicking the Medium or Hard buttons will spread the points out more randomly to make the line a bit harder to determine. This is not meant to be really hard but just a quick way to determine if students have the basic concept of what a line of best fit is


  • MPM1D, MFM1P - construct tables of values, scatter plots, and lines or curves of best fit as appropriate, using a variety of tools (e.g., spreadsheets, graphing software, graphing calculators, paper and pencil), for linearly related and non-linearly related data collected from a variety of sources
  • MAP4C - D1.4 - create a graphical summary of two-variable data using a scatter plot (e.g., by identifying and justifying the dependent and independent variables; by drawing the line of best fit, when appropriate), with and without technology
  • MDM4U - D2.4 - generate, using technology, the relevant graphical summaries of two-variable data (e.g., scatter plots, side-by-side boxplots) based on the type of data provided (e.g., categorical, ordinal, quantitative)
  • All that is needed is the electronic download (below)
  • Note that this really works well on an iPad using the Sketchpad Explorer App (which is free)
  • You can also use this on any web based computer (or Chromebook) with this Web sketch
Watch the video below to see how to use the sketch

  • Line of Best Fit.gsp (iPad/V5)
  • Web sketch here
  • For more sketches like this go to my look at the dynamic web sketch tab above
Did you use this activity? Do you have a way to make it better? If so tell us in the comment section. Thanks

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