Air Pollution
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… Continue
Birthday
In a class of 23 students, the chances are fifty-fifty that two of them will have the same birthday. Now that may sound impossible since… Continue
CO2 Growth
Spreadsheets offer us a nearly unlimited ability to develop and learn from case studies using real world data. We will focus mainly on climate change… Continue
Decimal Addition
Decimal addition is one of a series of Labs to help you understand and learn to use decimals. I think you will find it fun… Continue
Decimal Division
Decimal Division is one of a series of Labs to help you understand and learn to use decimals. I think you will find it fun… Continue
Decimal Subtraction
Decimal subtraction is one of a series of Labs to help you understand and learn to use decimals. I think you will find it fun… Continue
Decimals and Percents
Ratios can be written in a wide variety of different way: as fractions, as decimals, and as percents.,with a colon, with a slash, as a… Continue
Division and Ratio
We can make a division table just like we made a multiplication table. Division is surprisingly our most important operation in terms of most of… Continue
Equivalent Fractions
Fractions are ratios that’s why we call them rational numbers (ratio numbers). If you think about fractions as ratios, how does this help you to… Continue
Exploring Triangles
Create, manipulate, and explore triangles in this live interactive spreadsheet. On the surface, a triangle is being drawn on a graph, but the real magic… Continue
Fibonacci’s Sequence
Fibonacci, the nickname given the great medieval mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, is connected in most of our minds with the Fibonacci sequence. Spreadsheets make wonderful… Continue
Lights Out
This is one of those math puzzles that come up in contests but which turn out to be quite interesting mathematically. Imagine a long hallway… Continue
Magic Number (Infinite Series)
What if you made a series of unit fractions with the odd numbers as their denominator, added the first two together, subtracted the next one,… Continue
Magic Rectangle
Multiplication tables have some wonderful and quite surprising patterns. This is one of them. Draw any rectangle in a multiplication table and you will find… Continue
Mixture Problems
How many gallons of a 70% alcohol solution must be added to 30 gallons of a 10% alcohol solution in order to produce a new… Continue
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… Continue
Multiplying Integers
We have made a big deal of the times table and of other tables.Now we extend the times table to negative numbers and thus to… Continue
Napoleon’s Pyramid
When Napoleon conquered Egypt in 1798 he went to the Great Pyramid of Giza. While his men climbed to its peak, he figured out that… Continue
Normal Distribution
Most museums with math exhibits have a Pascal’s triangle made up of pegs with balls falling down between them and bouncing off of them. One… Continue
Pascal’s Triangle
Another famous pattern, Pascal’s triangle, is easy to construct and explore on spreadsheets. Create a formula for any cell that adds the two cells in… Continue
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… Continue
Prime Numbers
The prime numbers are among the most fascinating objects in all of mathematics. While we can generate them, we do not know or understand their… Continue
Rate of Growth
We look at world population over the past 60+ years and ask whether the earth’s population is growing faster or slower today. Is it out… Continue
Ratio and Proportion
We think about ratio tables in terms of motion. Move up 2 and over 1, or move up 1 and over 2. In this way… Continue
Rule of 72
The rule of 72 is an old banker’s rule of thumb to find out how long it will take to double your money at different… Continue
Shapes
Shapes introduces student to changing the colors in cells and to changing the shapes of cells by dragging the column or row separators in the… Continue
Solar System
When I was young I loved to play with planetary data, to explore their patterns, to learn more about astronomy, and to deal with large… Continue
The Chessboard
We take that great old problem of the inventor of chess and the ruler of India and use it to see how powers of 2… Continue
Triangular Numbers
1, 3, 6, 10… are called the triangular numbers because they can be stacked up to form a triangle. They are very interesting numbers, and… Continue
Work Problems
Suppose Tom can paint the entire fence in twelve hours, and Huck takes eight hours. How long would it take the two of them together… Continue