Apparently some guy once said, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." I'm pretty sure I'm not on board with that statement, but I do agree that exponentials are very challenging to make sense of. Linear growth is intuitive; exponential growth is not.
This video shows a tank of water filling up at an exponential rate. I think it would be interesting to have kids watch to really think about how fast its growing, and talk about what it means for something to grow at the same rate, or a constant rate. I wish there was a side-by-side video or another version showing linear (or quadratic) growth.
http://bl.ocks.org/hanbzu/9787042
Another thought with this video: use it in the introduction to exponentials and have kids make some predictions, do some graphing, etc. The clock in the corner is handy. Less handy is the fact that there's no marked height anywhere. If you projected onto a whiteboard could you mark height?
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