I haven’t written a blog post in a while, so I figured this tweet is as good a prompt as any to get back in to it.

I taught a math econ unit for a few years now and I have a few things that I do. I did a Global Math Dept talk once, but it was the only one ever that the audio recording dropped out on (sad face). Here are the slides from that.

In this talk I pretty much list all of the tricks I have, some of which include:

  • Giving kids credit card applications is always a good time. I’ve collected a box of those mailers that they send me, but you could find some of them online. Then you can make a task where the kids use exponential growth to see if they can manage life with a credit card. Here’s what I’ve used in the past.
  • Stock market games are always fun, even though there isn’t too much math involved unless they are doing some next level modelling and regression and what not. I had kids go to Marketwatch and play a game with the rest of the class to see who can make the most of their $100,000 investment.
  • My co-worker has a bunch of projects he uses for a lot of the formulas that use exponential growth for financial purposes.
  • Speaking of Exponential Growth here is a little lesson on exponential vs. linear growth that is a play on that whole “grain-of-rice-on-the-chessboard” thing:

Is this helpful? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.