Students are tasked to build a times table in just two steps. They have to learn to use absolute as well as relative addressing to do, and the Lab takes them through using them. We encourage students to work with just a row or a column rather than with the table as a whole because doing so makes it easier to see what is wrong or what does not follow the pattern. We believe students should learn to struggle to solve problems and that persistence, patience, and grit are important for all of us to have. We therefore do not want to tell students how to do something but rather to let them explore and try and keep at it until they get it. Spreadsheets with their openness and feedback provide a great opportunity for doing this in Labs like this. It is one of our favorites.
Category: Labs
Gas Money
If you commute to work or school, you understand how expensive driving can be. Choose a car in this interactive spreadsheet as it breaks down the cost of driving, using MPG, distance traveled, and cost of gas.
Moore’s Law
It was one of the most amazing visions of the future ever made. In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, proposed a law governing the future of computing. He originally proposed that the number of components on a chip would double every year. Later he revised that law to doubling every two years. You can take a look at the real data of CPU development over the past 40 years and see if it in fact has followed Moore’s law and whether it can continue. In the process you will be looking at very large numbers and the effects of exponential growth on something we now live with all the time.
Rows and Columns
We use the hundreds table to introduce rows and columns and focus students on seeing the patterns in these tables. Again and again we go back to making rules and using rules to ask and answer questions. For example, what rule would you make to fill in a column on the hundreds table. NOTE: we use color to connect a numbered task to a picture. You can remind students that they can change these colors if they want and copy and paste without changing a color by choosing Paste Formulas in the Paste Menu.
Addressing
We have been using cell addresses informally until now, but now we can be more formal and explicit. Different spreadsheets have different types of address bars, but all use the same format, letters for columns and numbers for rows with letters first and numbers second. We introduce this on the hundreds table which could be thought of as a miniature spreadsheet and use number lines to provide some additional feedback. Using addressing enables us to build rules as patterns and to put anything we want into cells to use those rules on. It is the great power of spreadsheets.