This chart recently came out from the American Lung Association about air pollution in the United States. How would you present this data to Congress to get them to deal with this serious problem?
Category: Labs
Absolute Value Polynomials
What would you guess the absolute value of a polynomial function would look like? Try some here. I think you will be very surprised. Can you explain what you see?
Absolute Value Functions
The absolute value (ABS) function is the positive value of a number or quantity. Its graph has a very peculiar shape, a V. Since absolute values are always positive we can think of them as distances on a numberline.
Powers of Ten
Picturing exponential growth, powers of 10, can be hard for any of us to imagine. The spreadsheet has the flexibility to enable us to explore the powers of 10 and to get a visual image of them. We can see the difference in shape between odd and even powers, and get a sense of the speed of exponential growth. We use powers of ten to gain a sense not only of big numbers but of how big spreadsheets can be.
Make a Hundreds Table
This is the graduation exercise for the basic use of spreadsheets. We combine rules and addressing to have students build their own hundreds table in the fewest steps. There are many ways of doing this and students can be as creative and exploratory as they want. Nor should they feel limited to tables that start at 1 and go to 100. These rules, these patterns should enable them to start anywhere and build any size table they can imagine. We strongly encourage students to stretch their minds here and to think outside of this box.