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Optimisation (ClassPad)

When studying quadratic functions/calculus, do too many of your students find ‘optimisation questions’ hard? Have you ever wondered why? The booklet you can download here is the unit of work that supports the ideas presented in a number of workshops during 2011 and 2012 that outlined why students find the ideas hard. Basically, traditional teaching-and-doing approaches fail to focus on what is really happening: the measurement on one dimension and the subsequent calculation of other dimensions. Also, algebraic simplification turns out to be the devil – the patterns in the symbols are lost and so generalisation is not ‘seen’! The approach in the booklet supports the idea of each student developing a calculation and then comparing and contrasting to it other’s calculations – it is in this that the symbolic patterns appear and the generalisation literally reveals itself.

CGC11 Calculating loan repayments

This short video shows how to calculate loan repayments on a reducing balance, compound interest loan using the Financial app of a CASIO fx-CG series graphics calculator. CG20 AU and CG50 AU versions presented.

CG601 Drawing a ‘dynamic’ graph

This short video shows how to draw an animated ‘dynamic’ graph showing the effect of changing a parameter upon the graph of a function, using the Dyna Graph app of a CASIO fx-CG series graphics calculator. CG20 AU and CG50 AU versions presented. In particular, the effect of changing the gradient value “m” in a linear function of the form y=mx+c is addressed.

CG515 Changing a graph’s View Window

This short video shows how to change a graph’s View Window, using the Graph app of a CASIO fx-CG series graphics calculator, and discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of different View Window settings. CG20 AU and CG50 AU versions are presented.

Cup Snakes – Describing Linear Change

A video introduction presents the mathematics of cup snakes, a hands on phenomena involving additive change that gives rise to a way to think about linear growth. Modeling this phenomena theoretically, with the help of two cups, and through data, with the help of many, many cups, these videos give rise to some of the big ideas around developing and using linear algebraic models to describe additive bi-variate change. These ideas are then unpacked in the accompanying ‘chapter replacement’ booklet.

Logarithms – when adding is multiplying (9860)

This unit aims to provide a simple/useful way to thing about logarithms when first meting them.
We use two examples of “hard” to graph data (due to the extreme range in the values) to alert students to the idea of thinking about a number as its power, as opposed to its absolute value.
The rest of the unit aims to establish a way to think about calculating with logarithms that will set a sound foundation for later on and that builds on their knowledge of ‘indices’ from previous years.

Flow – Ideas that underpin Differential Calculus

Presented here is a tried and proven three to five lesson sequence that begins with an engaging real-world context and grows students from the idea of average rate of change to instantaneous rate of change.

It is accessible to any student who has an understanding of average and gradient.

In this collection of resources you will find: a) a three-part introductory video (I, IIa and IIb), which structures the sequence of learning, b) two support video that shows “how to” do the technical stuff on the CG 20 AU.

The Confidence Interval for a Proportion

Understanding the confidence interval for a population proportion (p) This video is a Zoom-recording of a virtual lecture/talk, in which the presenter shares a tried and proven way to present the ideas that underpin the confidence interval for a population …

A quick list of sample means.

Download a program that will creates the number of samples you desire, of a size you define from a normal population with standard deviation and mean you define.

Developing ways-of-thinking about the ideas that form calculus

This video and documents outline a 4 session course that aim to assist students to develop the optimal ways-of-thinking about the ideas that underpin calculus.