If a picture’s worth a thousand words, how many can I save with an interactive app?

How do you explain what the ‘m’ and ‘b’ mean in y=mx+b? By letting someone experience their impact firsthand.

This app was built to visually demonstrate the meaning of ‘m’ and ‘b’ in the equation of a line. I could have drawn a bunch of separate charts to demonstrate the difference but this is much more engaging and extensible, and has opened up all sorts of new questions in the process. For example, notice how for very steep slopes, changing the Y intercept makes the line appear to move side to side. Y intercept makes it move up and down, but the limited frame of the plot creates some perceptual silliness.