Collaborative learning is an excellent opportunity for you to help students and for students to help each other with the graphing calculator. The number of calculator skills required in this text are minimal. At the end of the first chapter, students should be able to set a viewing rectangle, graph a function, evaluate mathematical expressions, and make a table, scatterplot or line graph. You may want to have one or more brief quizzes to make sure that students are learning the important concepts in Chapter 1. The following motivation for Chapter 1 should be explained explicitly to students.
Society creates data by inventing a variety of number systems to quantify data.
To better understand and analyze data, we create algorithms and visualize data using graphs and scatterplots. We invent functions to model data. Once a function is found that models a data set, we can use the function to solve problems and make predictions. Because there is such a wide variety of data, we need different types of functions to model data. Three common types of functions are constant, linear, and nonlinear.