Day 15 - Making an Amortization Table

Today students went to the lab and made amortization tables:

I got this from Ms. McClennon-Sowchuck. I really liked it because in the past, I would walk students through and it would be painful. I would be slowing down some students and others would be lost. This way, students worked in groups and read through instructions and I was walking around helping students through it.

I did change one small thing. I had them work in their Google Drive, using Google Sheets. The formulas work exactly the same, but this way they don't need to print it. So one student had the instructions open, the other typed and then they could share the file with me and with each other. Then students had to change their files. Each group got different conditions:

They then shared this file with me. They did notice that they only needed to change the numbers at the top and the number of rows. They did not quite finish this activity, but they did finish it within the first few minutes of the next day. They also shared the file with each other so that they would have a starting file for the next activity!

This worked very well. Students struggled a little bit with the formulas at first and many did  not know how to "fill down". They learned some very useful spreadsheet skills as well! They definitely saw the value in doing this in a spreadsheet instead of by hand! They stayed engaged right until the end.