A collection of relevant lessons to supplement your units in Algebra I/II. Mix these lessons into your course to show students the algebraic reasoning behind social issues, public health, the environment, business, sports, and more.

This task gives students an opportunity to work with exponential functions in a real world context involving continuously compounded interest. They will study how the base of the exponential function impacts its growth rate and use logarithms to solve exponential equations.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to interpret exponential and linear functions and in particular to identify and help students who have the following difficulties: translating between descriptive, algebraic and tabular data, and graphical representation of the functions; recognizing how, and why, a quantity changes per unit intervale; and to achieve these goals students work on simple and compound interest problems.

The goal of this task is to develop an understanding of why rational exponents are defined as they are (N-RN.1), however it also raises important issues about distinguishing between linear and exponential behavior (F-LE.1c) and it requires students to create an equation to model a context (A-CED.2

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This is a task from the Illustrative Mathematics website that is one part of a complete illustration of the standard to which it is aligned. Each task has at least one solution and some commentary that addresses important aspects of the task and its potential use.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: articulate verbally the relationships between variables arising in everyday contexts; translate between everyday situations and sketch graphs of relationships between variables; interpret algebraic functions in terms of the contexts in which they arise; and reflect on the domains of everyday functions and in particular whether they should be discrete or continuous.

This task emphasizes the expectation that students know linear functions grow by constant differences over equal intervals and exponential functions grow by constant factors over equal intervals.

This task rquires students to determine if linear functions would be useful to model relationships presented in a data table.

This task requires students to use the fact that on the graph of the linear function h(x)=ax+b, the y-coordinate increases by a when x increases by one. Specific values for a and b were left out intentionally to encourage students to use the above fact as opposed to computing the point of intersection, (p,q), and then computing respective function values to answer the question.

Students learn about the advantages and disadvantages of the greenhouse effect. They construct their own miniature greenhouses and explore how their designs take advantage of heat transfer processes to create controlled environments. They record and graph measurements, comparing the greenhouse indoor and outdoor temperatures over time. Students are also introduced to global issues such as greenhouse gas emissions and their relationship to global warming.

The purpose of this task is to give students an opportunity to explore various aspects of exponential models (e.g., distinguishing between constant absolute growth and constant relative growth, solving equations using logarithms, applying compound interest formulas) in the context of a real world problem with ties to developing financial literacy skills.

 Students will be reviewing and learning points/lines, slope formula, slope-intercept form, and standard form. over four days. Day five will be an accumulation of everything learned where students will use GeoGebra, an assistive technology tool, to graph linear models they create and will represent the linear model in both slope-intercept and standard form.*This work was made possible by the generous support of the National Science Foundation, grant #1755631, and the University of St. Francis Noyce STEM Educators Program

This task focuses on the fact that linear functions are characterized by constant differences over equal intervals. It could be used alongside to F-LE Equal Differences over Equal Intervals I & II.

These problems give students the opportunity to construct and compare linear, quadratic, and exponential models.