Estimating Area Under the Curve Using Desmos
Throughout my college career, I found a few websites and math programs that proved to be extremely useful for visualizing mathematics. One that was very useful is Desmos. Desmos is an online graphing tool that can do everything a graphing calculator can do, and sometimes more. One great application of Desmos is finding the area under a curve. The concept of finding the area under the curve is one that many students struggle with, so using a visual tool like Desmos will allow students to see the concept much better, and hopefully lead to a better understanding overall. In the activity below, I walk through how to find the area under a curve using an area formula, Riemann sums, and integrals.