Spreadsheets can be a great place for you to build your own games. Ryan has built one of his early favorites, Battleship, where you learn graphing as you try to sink your opponent’s battleships. Making your own games can be great fun. Try it.
Author: Ryan McQuade
Adding Machine
Multiplication is often thought of as repeated addition. By building a times table by using a repeated addition rule you will have a fun practice of the multiplication facts, and you will learn to build rules in spreadsheets. Rules let you program spreadsheets to do remarkable things like make the multiplication table in just a couple of easy steps.
Lemonade Stand
Manage a business. The Lemonade Stand has been a business simulation developed in many different versions. We believe this is the first time that it has been created as a spreadsheet simulation. If you are a young entrepreneur who wants to learn how a business works and how you can use spreadsheets to improve your business we encourage you to try our spreadsheet lemonade stand. It is based on standard business practices and shows you how to build a business model and simulate its profitability.
Making Fractions
Spreadsheet math generally focuses on ratio and proportion to develop the concept of fraction. But fractions is such a big problem in today’s curriculum that it seemed only right to use the power of spreadsheets to help students and teachers to gain some fraction-sense. This is a very simple spreadsheet that uses histograms to compare fractions. We expect students to play with this and to put in different fractions and guess which ones will be bigger or smaller and then check their guesses. This Lab only works on Excel Spreadsheets.
String Challenge
Strings need not begin and end on axes that are at right angles to each other which we call Cartesian. It is quite interesting that Descartes himself did not use axes at right angles. We consider this a challenge because students have to figure out how to move both the axes and the lines. Once you understand the process there is no end to the beauty of the string diagrams you can make. We suggest you check out the Web and Wikipedia for more ideas.