Education Technology


More Power to Ya!

Activity Overview

In this activity, students will use the Calculator application to explore the Power Rule. For each of the four examples, they will first examine "true" statements about various derivatives of xn where n is an integer. They will observe patterns and use these patterns to create a rule for finding the derivative of xn with respect to x. They will then use their rule to create examples of their own.

Key Steps

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    In this activity, students will use the Calculator application to explore the Power Rule. For each of the four examples, they will first examine “true” statements about various derivatives of xn where n is an integer. They will observe patterns, and use these patterns to create a rule for finding the derivative of xn with respect to x. They will then use their rule to create examples of their own.