Friday, May 2, 2008

David's Scribepost

Algebra Tiles

Algebra tiles are ways of showing algebra. The big sqares are the variable (n, x) squared, the long rectangles are the variable, and the little squares are the integer or the constant, it's just the number. There are two sides to Algebra Tiles, a white side, and a colored side, the white side means its a positive number, the colored side means its a negative number. So if your question is 3n+6 and you wanted to draw it out using Algebra Tiles, then it would look like this...

Theres something else that comes into effect when we do this, and its Zero Pairs. Zero pairs are when you have a positive and a negative, and they cancel eachother out.

It's like you owe money if there's a negative, and the positvive is how much money you have. Thats just one good way to try and understand intergers.

Afrer that we just did a bunch of questions and figured them out using algebra tiles, one of them would be 2n-6+4n-2+6-n. So how would you draw that out? Now if you can't tell where to start and which sign belongs to what, then try making the catapiller, start at the first number / opperation and circle to the next one.


Now thats nice but we want to group them.


We can get rid of some by finding zero pairs!


and we're left with 5n-2

And thats how you use Algebra tiles. We had homework too, 3 pages of it.

^ ^ On this one you only need to do up to question 18...^^

Good luck finnishing! I'm sure there's going to be more work.

1 comment:

Drea said...

You had alot of great information. Good scribe!