Jactus Plant Activites
We have developed a series of activities about a plant that grows exponentially over time. They make use of a geogebra script that enables students to compare the height of a plant that doubles each week.
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Feel free to use them in your own classroom!
Why Growing Plants?
The exponentially-growing plant allows students to compare two continuous quantities: height and time. Students can initially work with a geogebra sketch in order to investigate how the plant grows over time, and then they will attempt to quantify the nature of that growth.
The growing plant context allows students to compare different rates of growth (plants that double, triple, etc. each week) over different time periods (doubling every week versus every 4 weeks versus every day) with different initial heights (for instance, 1” versus 5”). As students develop a stronger understanding of how to represent exponential growth algebraically, they can then begin to make predictions about what how much a plant will grow every day when it doubles in 1 week.
The concrete nature of the growing plant activities provides a way for middle-school students to visualize exponential growth.