[Ghoser777]

I really think my students need more practice with radicals, so tomorrow (well, today now) we're going into the lab to work on an applet that I just wrote tonight. Can anyone tell me if there is anything seriously wrong with the program? It's not the most beautiful thing ever (one day, remember).

http://www.fahrenbacher.com/webpage/...let/index.html

Thanks!

[Tesseract]

Playing with it for a few minutes revealed no serious issues for me - other than I sucked at it and fired up Mathematica for help once I got to level 3 or so.

I used to be able to do that in my head, it brings back memories from algebra class... just not memories of how to do the math.

[driven]

Yeah, I suck at math ... nice tutorial though. I'm going to break out my "... for dummies" book on the subject soon and give it another whirl.

[loki74]

haha... I remember this stuff... from like. two weeks ago. Im in Alg II... recently covered quadratic equations, completing the square, etc. But I am too lazy to do that stuff now lol.

Its usually not that difficult as long as you have a piece of paper to do factor trees (dont have a paper handy) and if you know a few of the perfect squares/prime numbers.

Correct me if im wrong but I believe this is the procedure (or at least one of them).

1) make a factor tree
2) pull out all pairs of numbers (these are the perfect squares within the #)
3) simplify them (since they are pairs, they are perfect sqaures, easy enough)
4) simplify everything thats still in the radical

so... like

200
= 2 * 100
= 2 * 2 * 50
= 2 * 2 * 2 * 25
= 2 * 2 * 2 * 5 * 5

thats one pair of 2, one pair of 5, and a single one... so

= sqrt(2 * 2) * sqrt(5 * 5) * sqrt(2)
= 2 * 5 * sqrt(2)
= 10 * sqrt(2)


...is that right?

[Ghoser777]

Yep! Another way I do it is I have my kids look for the biggest perfect square that divides it. For example, 100 is the biggest that divides 200.

So: Sqrt(200) = Sqrt(100) * Sqrt(2) = 10 * Sqrt(2).

They usually figure out the biggest p.s. by a little guess and check. It gives them some practice with recognizing what divides what, which they need.

[Big Mac]

You're a terrific teacher, Ghoser. The only things I would add are a direction that says "press return after entering your answer," because that may not be apparent to everyone, and a note that the asterisk symbol is used on the keyboard as the multiplier. Oh, and maybe an additional button to show the levels window.