The purpose of this activity is to engage students in using arithmetic and pre-algebra techniques to solve a financial problem.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
Charlie plays tennis, with one ladder competition day each week.
It costs $70 for the season’s subs and his mother drives him the 10 km each way to the tennis club (running costs for the car are 70 cents per km).
If the season runs for 14 weeks, what is the cost of competing in this tennis club ladder?
If he finds a way to share transport with another player (so his Mother only needs to take him every second week), what would the cost for the season become?
Are the savings worthwhile?
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student calculates with rates using multiplication and adds on the fixed cost of tennis subscription to find a total cost and calculates the difference between full and part transport costs.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student represents the situations as linear relationships. He/She use a graph to compare the cost of the full and part transport options.
Printed from https://meaningfulmaths.nt.edu.au/mmws/nz/resource/tennis-costs at 8:52pm on the 26th February 2024