MTT

http://teach.fcps.net/trt10/Documents/VampiresWS.pdf is a cute PDF to give students that outlines the uses of excel for students to explore an exponential growth relationship.

The assignment helps students to walk through each step in identifying the relationship, working on their communication by asking students to describe what is happening to the numbers in each step, which helps them create an equation to model the growth, and then helps them understand applications by asking the students to make sense of the numbers, and compare the vampire population to the population of the world. Students are directed in where to find accurate values on the population, increasing their skills in finding reliable numerical data, and are helped to reason and come up with a proof by contradiction that Vampires could not exist.

This seemed like a great activity to get students to work with numbers, and get them to work with a very commonly used program that works well for graphing and looking at number patterns. Students are told to compute the first 8 entries of the exponential growth by hand, but then are told how to enter the formula and continue it. When trying to assess a long term relationship on something such as exponential growth, I think the use of technology really becomes a better source than a board because if you’re asking students to graph these values, it will go out of range quickly, and just seeing the numbers is hard for students to understand, which is why using excel to graph the points works very well.

As the lesson seemed to be aimed at a pre-algebar/algebra level, I really liked introducing the students to the idea of a proof by contradiction. I liked that the students were hearing the terms and seeing the process at an early level and in a concrete situation that would help the idea of a contradiction proof make sense.