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IM Geo.2.3 Lesson: Congruent Triangles, Part 1

If triangle ABC is congruent to triangle A'B'C'...

What must be true?

What could possibly be true?

What definitely can’t be true?

Player 1: You are the transformer. Take the transformer card. Player 2: Select a triangle card. Do not show it to anyone. Study the diagram to figure out which sides and which angles correspond. Tell Player 1 what you have figured out. Player 1: Take notes about what they tell you so that you know which parts of their triangles correspond. Think of a sequence of rigid motions you could tell your partner to get them to take one of their triangles onto the other. Be specific in your language. The notes on your card can help with this. Player 2: Listen to the instructions from the transformer. Use tracing paper to follow their instructions. Draw the image after each step. Let them know when they have lined up 1, 2, or all 3 vertices on your triangles.

Player 2 use the applet to sketch the transformations while Player 1 is giving instructions.

Replay invisible triangles, but with a twist. This time, the transformer can only use reflections—the last 2 sentence frames on the transformer card. You may wish to include an additional sentence frame: Reflect _____ across the angle bisector of angle _____.

Noah and Priya were playing Invisible Triangles. For card 3, Priya told Noah that in triangles ABC and DEF:



Here are the steps Noah had to tell Priya to do before all 3 vertices coincided:
  • Translate triangle  by the directed line segment from  to .
  • Rotate the image, triangle , using D as the center, so that rays  and  line up.
  • Reflect the image, triangle , across line .
After those steps, the triangles were lined up perfectly. Now Noah and Priya are working on explaining why their steps worked, and they need some help. Answer their questions. First, we translate triangle  by the directed line segment from  to . Point  will coincide with  because we defined our transformation that way. Then, rotate the image, triangle , by the angle , so that rays  and  line up. We know that rays  and  line up because we said they had to, but why do points  and  have to be in the exact same place?

Finally, reflect the image, triangle A''B''C'' across DE.

How do we know that now, the image of ray and ray  will line up?

How do we know that the image of point  and point  will line up exactly?