Grade 11 Functions is always a tough course for students whether students go from 10 academic to 11 University or 10 academic to 11 U/C the grade 11 curriculum does have a jump in the learning. Students in grade 11 will learn new/larger concepts and are required to practice through a range of application questions. One of the main new concepts in the grade 11 curriculum is exponential functions. This week one of my colleagues presented an activity to be used as an introductory lesson to exponential functions for a university level class. In this activity there were three stations created where each presented a problem that could be modeled by an exponential growth function. Being an introductory lesson the students are unaware of exponential growth applications or how exponential functions are represented. Thus students use existing mathematical knowledge and strategies to solve for the questions provided at each station. I really enjoyed the specific application questions my colleague had created for the students which were all very engaging and related to the interests of high school students. Examples included zombie apocalypse rate, ice bucket challenge and number of folds on a paper. For the first two stations, in order to solve for the number of people (infected or involed in the challenge) after x many days, there were counting chips provided. This helped the students visualize that there was a growth occurring however it was not linear or quadratic like they had already seen. The other station provided physical sheets of paper for the students to fold and record the squares created after each fold. Overall this activity was very useful as an introduction as it forced students to not only apply previous knowledge but also use critical thinking to lead them to exponential functions. Although this was created for university level class I see it also being useful in a university/college level class.
Grade 11 Functions is always a tough course for students whether students go from 10 academic to 11 University or 10 academic to 11 U/C the grade 11 curriculum does have a jump in the learning. Students in grade 11 will learn new/larger concepts and are required to practice through a range of application questions. One of the main new concepts in the grade 11 curriculum is exponential functions. This week one of my colleagues presented an activity to be used as an introductory lesson to exponential functions for a university level class. In this activity there were three stations created where each presented a problem that could be modeled by an exponential growth function. Being an introductory lesson the students are unaware of exponential growth applications or how exponential functions are represented. Thus students use existing mathematical knowledge and strategies to solve for the questions provided at each station. I really enjoyed the specific application questions my colleague had created for the students which were all very engaging and related to the interests of high school students. Examples included zombie apocalypse rate, ice bucket challenge and number of folds on a paper. For the first two stations, in order to solve for the number of people (infected or involed in the challenge) after x many days, there were counting chips provided. This helped the students visualize that there was a growth occurring however it was not linear or quadratic like they had already seen. The other station provided physical sheets of paper for the students to fold and record the squares created after each fold. Overall this activity was very useful as an introduction as it forced students to not only apply previous knowledge but also use critical thinking to lead them to exponential functions. Although this was created for university level class I see it also being useful in a university/college level class. 
No comments:
Post a Comment