# Engaging students: Powers and exponents

In my capstone class for future secondary math teachers, I ask my students to come up with ideas for engaging their students with different topics in the secondary mathematics curriculum. In other words, the point of the assignment was not to devise a full-blown lesson plan on this topic. Instead, I asked my students to think about three different ways of getting their students interested in the topic in the first place.

I plan to share some of the best of these ideas on this blog (after asking my students’ permission, of course).

This student submission comes from my former student Kayla (Koenig) Lambert. Her topic, from Pre-Algebra: powers and exponents.

A) Applications: What interesting word problems using this topic can your students do now?

I chose the problem below from http://www.purplemath.com because I think that solving a problem that deals with disease would be interesting to my students. People have to deal with sickness and disease everyday and I think that solving a real world problem would entice the students into wanting to learn more.

A biologist is researching a newly-discovered species of bacteria. At time t = 0 hours, he puts one hundred bacteria into what he has determined to be a favorable growth medium. Six hours later, he measures 450 bacteria. Assuming exponential growth, what is the growth constant “k” for the bacteria? (Round k to two decimal places.)

For this exercise, the units on time t will be hours, because the growth is being measured in terms of hours. The beginning amount P is the amount at time t = 0, so, for this problem, P = 100. The ending amount is A = 450 at t = 6. The only variable I don’t have a value for is the growth constant k, which also happens to be what I’m looking for. So I’ll plug in all the known values, and then solve for the growth constant:

$A = Pe^{kt}$

$450 = 100 e^{6k}$

$4.5 = e^{6k}$

$\ln(4.5) = 6k$

$k = \displaystyle \frac{\ln(4.5)}{6} = 0.250679566129\dots$

The growth constant is 0.25/hour.

I think this kind of problem would be beneficial to students because it would help them understand how bacteria grows and how easily they can get catch something and get sick.

C) Culture: How has this topic appeared in pop culture?

Exponents and powers are everywhere around us without the students knowledge. Many movies and video games have ideas related to powers and exponents. Take, for example, the movie Contagion that was released in September 2011. This movie is about “the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778). In this movie, there is a scene where the doctors are using mathematical equations with exponents to find out how fast the disease spreads and how much time they have left to save the majority of the population. There are many movies like this that involve powers and exponents, Contagion is just one example. There are also popular video games that deal with the spread of disease. For example, in the video game Call Of Duty: World At War the player is a soldier in WWII and his mission is to kill zombies, and zombie populations grow exponentially. Now, my brother plays this game and I know for a fact that he doesn’t think about the mathematics behind it, but I think talking about pop culture while teaching would really bring some excitement to the classroom and get the students thinking.

D) History: Who were some of the people who contributed to the discovery of this topic?

Exponents and powers have been among humans since the time of the Babylonians in Egypt. “Babylonians already knew the solution to quadratic equations and equations of the second degree with two unknowns and could also handle equations to the third and fourth degree” (Mathematics History). The Egyptians also had a good idea about powers and exponents around 3400 BC. They used their “hieroglyphic numeral system” which was based on the scale of 10. When using their system, the Egyptians expressed any number using their symbols, with each symbol being “repeated the required number of times” (Mathematics History). However, the first actual recorded use of powers and exponents was in a book called “Artihmetica Integra” written by English author and Mathematician Michael Stifel in 1544 (History of Exponents). In the 14th century Nicole Oresme used “numbers to indicate powering”(Jeff Miller Pages). Also, James Hume used Roman Numerals as exponents in the book L’Algebre de Viete d’vne Methode Novelle in 1636. Exponents were used in modern notation be Rene Descartes in 1637. Also, negative integers as exponents were “first used in modern notation” by Issac Newton in 1676 (Jeff Miller Pages).

Works Cited

Ayers, Chuck. “The History of Exponents | eHow.com.” eHow | How to Videos, Articles & More – Discover the expert in you. | eHow.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. http://www.ehow.com/about_5134780_history-exponents.html.

“Contagion (2011) – IMDb.” The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/.

“Exponential Word Problems.” Purplemath. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. http://www.purplemath.com/modules/expoprob2.htm.

“Mathematics History.” ThinkQuest : Library. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. http://library.thinkquest.org/22584/.

juxtaposition.. “Earliest Uses of Symbols of Operation.” Jeff Miller Pages. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. http://jeff560.tripod.com/operation.html.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.