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Older students, especially those with a new or imminent driver's license, will be both fascinated and educated by Calculating a Car Payment . Here, students visit a virtual used-car lot and select a car. Then they use formulas that include complex fractions and large exponents to calculate the monthly payments on their virtual dream car. This is a short lesson, but students may be inspired to use it as a springboard to other automobile-based activities. For example, Online Math Applications' Trips page contains mini-lessons on the costs of leasing, owning, and driving cars. Students can examine such topics as the relationship between the number of stops and the number of possible routes, how to determine the shortest route, and the relationship between speed and braking distance. The site contains formulas and quizzes and provides opportunities for students to create their own quizzes using the math and real life data they've learned. .
Of course, once students have calculated car payments, they still need the money to buy the car, and what better place to look for money than at the Stock Exchange? In the multidisciplinary A Web-Based Interactive Stock Market Learning Project for K-12 , students learn how the stock market works and discover how factors, such as company management, politics, weather, and other variables, affect it. In the unit's math lessons, students calculate commissions and odds, compare price-to-earnings ratios, use fractions and decimals, graph the results of various investment strategies, and more. The project's Teacher Resources reference those activities to NCTM standards and include lesson plans, presentation options, links to stock-quote servers, and reproducible project forms. Student Resources includes links to information about the companies behind the stock offerings, as well as tips for choosing stocks.