Tag Archives: exponential

T-Block Visual Pattern

I created this visual pattern as a followup to the I Rule! exercise from MVP.  It is intended to be more difficult than I Rule!.  When I gave this to my students, I included a linear T-Block just like MVP does for I Rule!  

TBlock

I asked them two questions:

1.  How many squares are in the 10th sequence

2.  How many squares are in the nth sequence

Only a couple of my students actually got to the right answer, but the effort was tremendous.  I had students coming to me during lunch and saying they had asked all their friends and they couldn’t figure it out.  Students were telling me they worked with their parents and couldn’t get it.  I had a student (who failed first semester mind you) tell me that her and her two math tutors stayed 45 minutes after their session working on it and couldn’t figure it out.  She had two pages of work.  I have a couple students who get 100% on everything they touch, and they didn’t figure it out.  So yay me!  I challenged them 🙂

Here’s the I Rule! pattern:

IBlockMVP

Check out many more visual patterns at visualpatterns.org – a site created and curated by my conference buddy Fawn Nguyen (@fawnpnguyen)

The Goods:

Here is the worksheet I used, not sure if I will include the linear T next year.

TBlockWithLinear