Look closely at the equation of the parabola to identify respective values of a and b. For instance, in the equation y = 2x^2 + 6x + 2 the values for "a" would be 2 and "b" would be 6.
Find the result of the multiplication between the value of "b" and -1/2. For this case, the result will give -3.
Perform a division of the result you obtained in Step 2 by the value of "a" in the original equation. In this example, the division will culminate with -1.5 as the answer. In doing this, you now have the x coordinate (h) of the parabola.
Replace the values of the unknown (x) in the original equation by the new obtained value of x to find the value of y coordinate (k). Still on this example, replacing the value of x in the equation gives -2.5. This implies that this figure is the coordinate value of y. Therefore, the vertex (h, k) of the parabola is defined as (-1.5, -2.5).