Category Archives: Precalculus

Constructing Ellipses

This just in from Ms. Anderson:

My Honors Precalculus class doing an exploration on how the eccentricity of an ellipse affects its shape. As they explored different ellipses with the same ‘a’ value, and determined that an ellipse with an eccentricity closer to 0 looks more like a circle, they had to analyze why that was the case by looking at the value of b as c approached zero.

You can try the activity yourself using this handout!