Hello to all of my readers, students, etc. My name is Lindsey. I am currently in the process of becoming a high school math teacher. While I can say that I am pretty good at math now, I wasn't always this way. Throughout elementary school and middle school I greatly struggled in math. I also struggled in math for the first half of my high school career. It was not until my senior year that my perception of math changed. I had an awesome teacher that made math fun and that made me want to pay attention. Long behold, once I started paying attention in math I became pretty good at it. Through college I decided that I wanted to become a teacher, and the only subject that I could see myself teaching was math. I would not call myself a genius and a crazy mathematician, however I love Algebra and Geometry. I hope to be a high school Geometry teacher one day that incorporates fun in my classroom. Because of my experience with math I highly believe that it needs to be fun and engaging to get students' attention. I recently discovered a fun math assignment that I absolutely loved. It was surprising to me that I had never seen this before. If you use the number 4, you can create an equation to equal all numbers from 1 to infinity, granted I know that nobody has reached infinity. The rule of the assignment is that you have to use only 4, and you have to have four of them in each equation. the best part is that you can use any exponents you want and you can use radicals. I have listed some examples below. The fun thing about this assignment is there are several ways to create each number, so the way I created a number may not be the way that you created a number. This is a great assignment to help implement PEMDAS or exponential rules.
0= (4^0- 4^0) + (4^0- 4^0)
1= (4/4) + (4^0- 4^0)
2= (4/4) + (4/4)
3= (4/4) + 4^0 + 4^0
4= 4^0 + 4^0 + 4^0 + 4^0
I would like to go on however I do not have the tools to insert radicals, but you should get the idea. I was able to go up to 50 in about an hour, and it was really fun for me. If anyone wants a copy of my work, I can email it to you through this site. I tried to copy and paste however it was not working for some reason...
Anyways I hope you enjoyed this idea and I hope you learn to incorporate fun with your math!!
Lindsey