What's Exponential Growth?

Today we talked about how using exponents could be a useful thing in real life. Most students in class reported having a savings account. Using different interest rates, students calculated by hand how much money would be in the bank if they invested $100 at 1.24% interest for several years. Next, the same process was used to calculate how much they would have after 5 years if they could invest the same $100 at 18% interest. After being convinced that using hand calculations was pretty laborious, we looked at the exponential growth model formula and discovered that this was a much faster way to come up with the answers to these types of problems. One problem we encountered was that different calculators had different buttons to press in order to make things work efficiently ( ^ vs. y to the x buttons, for example).

Tonight's Homework: None.