Going to keep this one short.
How do we effectively introduce the idea of exponents and powers? Our first idea was to think about what things have exponential growth that actually matters to kids. So we first thought of youtube videos. Viral videos potentially grow because 1 person tells many people, and those people tell every more people... and so on. There's a link to be drawn there. Not a tight link, but a strong enough one that can lead to some good solid introductions. So we decided on this video:
Look at the number of views (right now):
Awesome. Lots to talk about there.
Then on my drive home I kept thinking about it -- and a story that I've heard a long time ago struck me. Wasn't there a pennies on chessboard story that involved exponential growth? Well more correctly the "wheat and chessboard problem" that involves geometric series (as I found out through a bit of digging).
I edited the video from "Excerpt from the IBM film "Mathematics Peepshow"" a bit and voila
Talk talk talk, discuss discuss discuss... (I may elaborate on what we talked about if I have some time in the future... but for now, use your imaginations!)
Consolidate
Bam... Act 3:
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