Activity Description Investigate the relationships between the famous Mandelbrot Set fractal and Julia sets by clicking and zooming.

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The Mandelbrot Set

Place in mathematics curriculum:

• practice students' arithmetic skills
• practice students' point plotting skills
• introduce students to complex numbers
• investigate the notions of Julia sets, prisoners and escapees
• explore the Mandelbrot set

This activity allows the user to investigate the Mandelbrot set associated with functions.

f(Z) = Z^2 + C

This activity would work well in mixed ability groups of two or three for about thirty minutes if you use the exploration questions and ten minutes otherwise.

Preparations for this activity:

• give implicit directions on what they are to do. For example "Today we are going to look at the Mandelbrot set and see what we can learn about it. We will try to answer the questions on the worksheet..."
• answer the question "What are we supposed to get from this?"
• discuss how the Mandelbrot set is made