Then we are going to practice more working with Exponential Relationships.
You are going to be recieiving a few seperate real life example story problems of how exponents are used.
On the back of the hand-out I give you to need to figure out the following problem.
http://www.otherwise.com/population/exponent.html
We are going to look at the above web-site before working on the below examples....
- Introductory Activity
You have just won the grand prize on a game show. The game show host tells you that you may choose from one of two cash prizes but you only have 30 seconds to decide. Your choices are
$1,000 per day for 30 days
$0.01 (one penny) the first day, $0.02 the next
day, $0.04 the next day....for 30 days. Each day's pay is
double the pay from the previous day.
Which would you choose?
Most students will choose Prize #1. Ask them to calculate
the total money for each prize on a sheet of paper and
they will realize that they would be multimillionaires if
they chose prize 2. After students have calculated the
prize amounts they will graph both amounts on seperate
graphs. This is the power of exponential growth.
This activity can also be extended to find the formula for exponential growth by using the student's calculations of the prize money and searching for the pattern. Once students notice a patter they can generalize the pattern for all cases. They have now discovered the formula for exponential growth.
