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?
Showing posts with label Exponentials. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Exponentials. Show all posts
Monday, March 31, 2014
Friday, September 27, 2013
What's Number Are You?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515
According to this website, of all the people living on Earth, I was the 4,611,347,584th person to be born. Can you figure out how old I am???
There are lots of other interesting mathematical things about this. First, just the fact that the population of the Earth increased by about 2.5 billion people in my lifetime--more than half of what it was when I was born--is just staggering. I know that large numbers are hard for kids to conceptualize (adults too! me (non-kid, non-adult) too!), but there's something in here that makes you say WOAH. Even if you put in a kid's birthday (I picked a random 15 year old), there were still about 1 billion people born in their lifetime.
Of course there's also interesting stuff with exponential growth, how we would calculate this number, and so on. I'm also interested in the statistic of how many people have been born on Earth since the beginning of time. This website gives an interesting summary of that calculation, including this video:
According to this website, of all the people living on Earth, I was the 4,611,347,584th person to be born. Can you figure out how old I am???
There are lots of other interesting mathematical things about this. First, just the fact that the population of the Earth increased by about 2.5 billion people in my lifetime--more than half of what it was when I was born--is just staggering. I know that large numbers are hard for kids to conceptualize (adults too! me (non-kid, non-adult) too!), but there's something in here that makes you say WOAH. Even if you put in a kid's birthday (I picked a random 15 year old), there were still about 1 billion people born in their lifetime.
Of course there's also interesting stuff with exponential growth, how we would calculate this number, and so on. I'm also interested in the statistic of how many people have been born on Earth since the beginning of time. This website gives an interesting summary of that calculation, including this video:
The World Bank has a shorter video on the same topic:
I like the stat in this video that 7% of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. Holy smokes!
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Double or Nothing
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=5394
Parks & Recreation clip about betting on a pool game.
The questions:
How many games did they play?
How long were they playing for?
Parks & Recreation clip about betting on a pool game.
The questions:
How many games did they play?
How long were they playing for?
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