There is no one I would rather borrow cells from

Video created by Kim Holman using Adobe Character Studio. Original song. 2022.

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I. LOVE. SPREADSHEETS.

I have always loved spreadsheets. The first time I opened Excel I fell in love. The neat and cleans rows and columns, the drag & fill, the automation, ease, and efficiency spoke to me and had me hooked. I use spreadsheets to mail-merge my Christmas card list, to keep track of packages I'm waiting to arrive, to keep up with my schedule - all manner of things not mathematics or statistics related.

Of course, these are not the things that usually come to mind when we think about spreadsheets. I use them for traditional uses, too. When I was a student majoring in Biology, I did data analysis, made charts and graphs, and performed regressions. In mathematics, I use them to make tables, do modeling, and demonstrate sequences.

As highlighted in Principles to Actions (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 2015), spreadsheets are an effective way to interactively identify patterns. This is particularly useful to teach the concept of sequences! In class, we looked at first and second differences to identify linear and quadratic relationships as well as exponential ones. The Alabama course of study: Mathematics (Alabama State Department of Education [ALSDE], 2019) has a myriad of standards that can be taught with the assistance of spreadsheets. Aside from the clear standards corresponding to Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability, there are standards related to Proportional Reasoning, Number Systems and Operations, Algebra and Functions, Mathematical Modeling ... almost every group aside from Geometry, really, where spreadsheets would be of significant assistance in teaching concepts.

Beigie (2017) discusses using spreadsheets in the classroom at length in "Optimization problems with spreadsheets". In particular, he talks about using spreadsheets for algebraic problems and extensions of algebraic word problems. An example that I have worked on for a mathematical modeling class is shown below; the task was to determine the best dosing scheme for a pain medication, with constraints.

In the medication dosing example, a real-world scenario was modeled using spreadsheets.

I am looking forward to spreading the joy of spreadsheets to my students. One of the more exciting things we learned in class was how to model recursive expressions and how to identify algebraic and geometric sequences, then turn those sequences into series as well as find the closed-form function of the sequences. This topic, traditionally reserved for advanced high school or early college students studying precalculus, becomes accessible to students in the middle grades. How amazing is that?!

Gif retrieved from Giphy

I! LOVE! SPREADSHEETS!

References

Principles to actions. (2014). National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Alabama course of study: Mathematics. (2019). Alabama State Department of Education.

Beigie, D. “Optimization Problems with Spreadsheets.” The Mathematics Teacher, vol. 111, no. 1, 2017, pp. 27–38.