Support for long-term classroom planning and professional development. Information covering important topics for today's educators and parents. The activities for grades 7 to 10 are designed to engage students in collecting real world data and applying appropriate mathematics. In a sample activity, Thickest Piece of Paper in the World, students are given the fact that a piece of notebook paper is about 0.0032 inches thick. They fold a piece of notebook paper in half and repeat the process several more times.
Students calculate the thickness of the paper for the first six folds and fill in a table.
Students are then introduced to exponential growth and given the general formula to apply to paper folding. The statistics menu of the calculator is used to create a scatter plot of the thickness of the paper for zero to fifteen folds of the paper. Finally, students answer questions designed to have them consider the differences between linear and exponential functions. Other questions have students consider what effect using a different type of paper would have on the experiment and what would be the best unit of measure to express the thickness resulting from 25 folds. All answers are included.