Thursday, August 1, 2013

Precalculus Retirement Project

I came up with a pretty useful retirement project idea for my Precalculus class. I say this is useful because more and more, I find that a lot of our friends are stressing over what's going to happen when our parents retire. Are they going to have enough money to get by? For how long? It seems to be a somewhat complex problem to predict accurately, because each month both the interest compounds and the principal left in the bank decreases.

So, to that effect, I plan to do a retirement project at the end of studying sequences and recursive/explicit formulas, and the kids are going to write a letter to their parents to make recommendations on why planning for a continued source of income post-retirement is really essential. Hopefully, this will help their parents talk to them a bit about money and financial planning, which I find that in some families is not as open a topic as it ought to be.

Check it out: http://bit.ly/retirementProj

It's still early in my planning of the course, and I would love any suggestions you may have! Geoff recommended that I could teach the kids to cross-check the explicit formula results from their calculator tables against the results from Excel (which are essentially iterations of the recursion from row to row, when you drag the formula downwards).

No comments:

Post a Comment