This unit follows five college students as they plan a bicycle touring business. Students explore relationships between variables and learn how to represent these relationships in tables, graphs, written rules, and equations. The MathMania game, number lines, thermometers, and colored chips are used to help students understand operations with positive and negative integers. Students learn to plot points with negative coordinates, and use their graphing calculators to compare profit equations for a bike tune-up business. Students use differences, ratios, rates, and percents to compare data, and they learn how to decide which method of comparison is best in a given situation.
Students explore problem situations involving linear relationships.
The idea of packaging is used to introduce students to the concepts of surface area and volume. By measuring, filling, and designing packages, students develop formulas for volumes and surface areas of prisms, cylinders, cones, and spheres. By playing and analyzing computer and carnival games, students investigate ideas about probability. As students work with news reports about natural disasters and accidents, they develop methods for making sense of large numbers. Students learn to use graph and equation models to represent data trends.