This sequence was developed by math teacher and blogger Cathy Yenca. She needed to teach her students what it meant for a number to be raised to the power of zero. Rather than just tell them it always equals one, she designed a guided exploration over a series of slides to connect to what students already know about exponents and deepen their conceptual knowledge of how exponent notation works.
It starts with students identifying patterns:
She created her activity in Desmos, where she had her students at computers completing their work on each slide before moving forward. I took those slides (linked to the weblink above) and made them into student handouts (linked to the docx above). I created the handout version of the activity because many of us in adult education do not have access to computer labs. But if you do, I think it would be good practice for students. Her slides have students enter numbers into boxes, write short answers, move numbers and categorize them in groups.
I would second Cathy’s recommendation of facilitating a whole-class conversation for students to share their observations and conjectures, before moving on to the predictions.
To read Cathy’s blog post about how she created the activity and some samples of her student work, click on weblink2 above.
