Mathematics 9 Powers and Exponents

Specific Curriculum Outcomes

N01     Students will be expected to demonstrate an understanding of powers with integral bases (excluding base 0) and whole number exponents.

N02     Students will be expected to demonstrate an understanding of operations on powers with integral bases (excluding base 0) and whole number exponents. (Exponent Laws)

N04     Students will be expected to explain and apply the order of operations, including exponents, with and without technology.

N01 activities

  • Who Wants to be a Millionaire Warm-up Question - Which of these square numbers also happens to be the sum of two smaller square numbers. Check out the "Ask the Audience poll on the right side of the picture." You can also check out the clip on YouTube to see how he did. 
  • Maximum Value of an Exponent from Open Middle - Use the digits 1 to 9, at most one time each, to fill in the boxes to make a result that has the greatest value possible. What would be the answer if the solutions could be a four digit number? What would be the answer if you could use digits more than once?
  • Thinking of Powers from Bryan Anderson  - A nice open middle problem from Bryan Anderson. If you could only use the numbers 1 to 9, each only once, could you fill in the boxes to make the figure true?
  • Would You Rather from John Stevens - Would you rather put $3 in the bank and have it triple each week for four weeks or put $4 in the bank and have it quadruple each week for three weeks?

N02 and N04 Activities

  • Exponent Experimentation 1 from Illustrative Mathematics - Students decide whether each equation is true and explain how they know.
  • Math Mistakes with Exponents from Andrew Stadel - Andrew has students analyse mistakes other students have made when evaluating exponential expressions and solving exponential equations. Students have to find the mistake, correct it, and justify the correct solution.
  • Exponent Rules Row Game - A row game is a self checking activity. A worksheet of problems is organized in two columns. Column A and column B. The pair of problems in each row has to have the same answer. If students don't get the same answer, they work together to find the error(s). Ilona Vashchyshyn created this row game for Exponent Rules.
  • Exponents and Order of Operations from Open Middle - Find 3 positive integers that add up to 10. Place each number into one of the blanks to find the largest possible result.
  • 24 Math Game - This game is excellent practice for order of operations. The original version of 24 is played with an ordinary deck of playing cards with all the face cards removed. The aces are taken to have the value 1 and the basic game proceeds by having 4 cards thrown and the first player that can achieve the number 24 exactly using only allowed operations (such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and parentheses) wins the hand. Some groups of players allow exponentiation, roots, logarithms and/or additional operations.  There is also a commercial version of the game.  You could play this game as a whole class as well.