This collection of guided notes was created through a Round Fifteen Mini-Grant for Ancillary Materials Creation and Revision. Major topics include:

Review Topics
Equations and Inequalities
Functions and Graphs
Other Functions and Inequalities
Exponentials and Logarithms

This is a direct task suitable for the early stages of learning about exponential functions. Students interpret the relevant parameters in terms of the real-world context and describe exponential growth.

Intermediate Algebra is a textbook for students who have some acquaintance with the basic notions of variables and equations, negative numbers, and graphs, although we provide a "Toolkit" to help the reader refresh any skills that may have gotten a little rusty. In this book we journey farther into the subject, to explore a greater variety of topics including graphs and modeling, curve-fitting, variation, exponentials and logarithms, and the conic sections. We use technology to handle data and give some instructions for using a graphing calculator, but these can easily be adapted to any other graphing utility.

Students come to see the exponential trend demonstrated through the changing temperatures measured while heating and cooling a beaker of water. This task is accomplished by first appealing to students' real-life heating and cooling experiences, and by showing an example exponential curve. After reviewing the basic principles of heat transfer, students make predictions about the heating and cooling curves of a beaker of tepid water in different environments. During a simple teacher demonstration/experiment, students gather temperature data while a beaker of tepid water cools in an ice water bath, and while it heats up in a hot water bath. They plot the data to create heating and cooling curves, which are recognized as having exponential trends, verifying Newton's result that the change in a sample's temperature is proportional to the difference between the sample's temperature and the temperature of the environment around it. Students apply and explore how their new knowledge may be applied to real-world engineering applications.

Using Avida-ED freeware, students control a few factors in an environment populated with digital organisms, and then compare how changing these factors affects population growth. They experiment by altering the environment size (similar to what is called carrying capacity, the maximum population size that an environment can normally sustain), the initial organism gestation rate, and the availability of resources. How systems function often depends on many different factors. By altering these factors one at a time, and observing the results, students are able to clearly see the effect of each one.

This is the Project MathTalk homepage that has videos on the following topics: Parabolas, Proportions, Algebraic Expressions, Exponentials, Logarithms, Binomials, Trigonometry, and more.  Over 400 FREE, short, online videos that feature students working on mathematics problems and resolving their struggles through conversation. The instructional approach to the videos draws on evidence-based practices from the latest research in mathematics education. Engaging with the videos enables learners to explore conceptually rich mathematics problems by watching other students talk about math problems via an accessible online platform. The site also contains useful materials for teachers, researchers, and teacher educators. 

Students examine graphical and tabular data to determine whether the evidence suggests that becomes CO² concentrations and temperature rise can be linked causally. The resource provides graphs and tabular data for student investigation and a student worksheet. This is an activity from Space Update, a collection of resources and activities provided to teach about Earth and space. Summary background information, data and images supporting the activity are available on the Earth Update data site.