I can’t be the only teacher to get a bit excited to see Dustin Henderson break out circumcenter to figure out the source of the wall in the final season of Stranger Things. Side note: yes, I sighed when he said Algebra I instead of Geometry.
It just so happens that the first week back after Holiday Break my Honors Geometry class is doing a quick mini-unit on the centers of triangles. So I was immediately intrigued with the possibility of including Stranger Things this week. A quick search on Youtube showed a couple of shorts explaining the math behind Dustin’s circumcenter, but nothing that asked students to DO the math themselves.
So I created a Desmos Activity: Hawkins Circumcenter to have my students find the equations of the lines connecting 3 points of a triangle and then apply perpendicular bisectors to find the circumcenter.
I was unable to find a great map online of Hawkins so my circle goes off the map and is not exactly like the ones in the TV show.
The activity assumes previous experience with finding equations of lines using point slope form, finding midpoints of lines, and finding perpendicular bisectors using the opposite reciprocal slope.
For the first problem I used some decimals for the points to try and get it more accurate, but that is not necessary. If students use whole number approximations for the points they should end up close to the center and that leads to an intriguing discussion about rounding, estimating, and error.
I plan to review perpendicular and angle bisectors with this Desmos Activity: Centers in Triangles by Trevor Sorensen first. I will probably use my Hawkins Circumcenter Desmos Activity as review before our quiz at the end of the week.
Feel free to try it out with your class and let me know how it goes… You can make a copy and edit as well if you want to adjust things a bit!
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