Up, Up and Away
Students will create graphs from a spreadsheet, discover linear relationships, and explain the real world meaning of slope. Students need concrete experiences in diverse and meaningful contexts to develop an understanding of the concepts of slope and function. Students measure circumference and flight time for deflating balloons. They create a spreadsheet of the data and create graphs using pairs of actual and projected measures from the experiment. They then examine the graphs to identify linear and non-linear relationships. Understanding slope as a rate of change is an important part of the study of functions, which in turn provides the basis for much of the study of algebra. They analyze the slope of the linear relationships and interpret the meaning of their graphs.
