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Rational Number Relationships

Activity Description Activity Guide


In this activity, students use an interactive spreadsheet template to explore relationships and patterns in rational numbers. The students will also learn how to create the template. Parts of this activity were originally used in an elementary classroom and are further described in the following article:

Drier, H. S. (2000). Investigating mathematics as a community of learners. Teaching Children Mathematics 6(6).

Mathematical Topics: Students will explore relationships between fractions, decimals, percents and pie graphs. Students will also explore several relationships as functions both numerically and graphically and discuss the limit of the expression x/(x+1)

Mathematical Thinking: Students will use patterns and proportional reasoning to discover and explain relationships in rational numbers.

Technology: Students will use scroll bars to change values of cells and observe changes in multiple representations. The students will also learn how to insert scroll bars in a spreadsheet and format the scroll bar to control the values of the numerator and denominator of the fraction.

The following screenshot displays the interactive template used in this exploration.
This file can be downloaded from the following website:

Microsoft Excel Interactive Projects


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Last modified on July 27, 2001.