Conic Sections

Good variety!

     

There's a good variety here in how to look at conic sections -- as sections of a cone, with the usual coordinates, with matrices, in general polynomial form, in polar coordinates, and so on.

There's also a lot of "guts" showing: some of the graphics like the ones at the top here come with equations, and some of those equations would be pretty tough to explain in a classroom! On the other hand, some kids might get motivated to learn some math to understand how to make pretty pictures like these for themselves.

There's a lot of simplifying that could be done, perhaps. For example, it would be nice if the x', y' coordinates could be related to the x,y coordinates in some way without having to repeat the formulas in multiple places, to make the relationship more explicit and clear.