MPM1D1 - Day 37 Exponents & Equations of Lines

With Halloween approaching I thought today would be a good day to look at a candy corn estimate. As a side note, I'm not sure that Canadian teens are as fond of candy corn as American teens are. It seems that every year half of my class says that they hate this stuff. Perhaps a more formal study will be necessary.

My students had a three day weekend so I thought I should remind them of some of the exponent work we did last Thursday. We quickly recapped some of the rules and went through some of the challenging homework questions. We also spent some time talking about what it means to have a fraction raised to an exponent. The overwhelming majority of my students wanted to convert the fraction to a decimal then use their calculators. I pushed them to stay with the fractions and write the power as a multiplication statement. Most were able to do that, but again wanted to convert to a decimal and multiply. We got to the point where we had an answer as a fraction, but I think we need to work a little more with fractions so that students are as comfortable working with fractions as they are with decimals.

I also gave this problem:

I figured students would be able to come up with an answer but I asked them to also come up with an answer that involved using exponents. There were some great discussion, and arguments, around the room.

Next, we moved onto writing equations of lines. We've done this before, but there was always a context. I wanted to move away from the context to make this a little more abstract. The goal was to find the equation of a line given two points. We reviewed what the equation of a line looks like and how to find slope. Then we talked about how we could use a point, along with the slope, to find the y-intercept. We worked through an example and then I let them try it. Here's the handout we started with.They didn't have much time so we'll continue with this tomorrow.