Khan/khan-exercises — Issue #12374: Exponents 4 - Better explanation required
Author: KhanBugz
Created: 2012-01-29 05:14:10+00:00
State: open
Labels: chrome, hard, win7

Reporter: dhaslip@gmail.com

The Khan Academy is just brilliant and is amazing! On this particular exercise I ran into some trouble with raising fractions to exponents that were also exponents and the "hints" gave an unsatisfactory explanation of the process for solving the problem. I used an outside video to finally come to an understanding about the problem, and it listed a step which saves time in solving these problems. The step is after 4^3/2 is changed to (4^1/2)^3 and the hint says (?)^2 = 4? However, I think you should teach that raising to the 1/2 power is the same as taking the square root so instead of trying to figure out the (?)^2 = 4 you can just take the square root of 4 and get 2, much much easier with large numbers too.

The video I used to learn this subject is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKjAcBWORio&feature=related

I think this section warrents one more video specifically about this issue since it was vague to me, but I might be the only one!

Take care & keep up the good work!

[exponents_4.html?seed=19&problem=0](http://sandcastle.khanacademy.org/media/castles/Khan:master/exercises/exponents_4.html?seed=19&problem=0&debug)

[Answer timeline](http://sandcastle.khanacademy.org/media/castles/Khan:master/exercises/exponents_4.html?seed=19&problem=0&debug&activity=%5B%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C189%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C190%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C190%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C191%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C191%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C191%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C191%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C191%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C192%5D%2C%5B%22hint-activity%22%2C%220%22%2C192%5D%5D)

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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.77 Safari/535.7

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