Hooked
by MathBait®
Dysfunctional
Honors Algebra
The Cartesian Plane is nothing more than a battlefield; one where we can send our soldiers to positions to make outstanding and powerful formations! Join us as we tackle Algebra I & II through exploration.
What's Included?
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Weekly small-group instruction with an expert instructor
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Access to our Online Portal, The Kryptografima
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Weekly text-based missions
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Games and practice activities
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Knowledge Checks
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Unit Challenges (quizzes)
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Online forum for additional support
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Certificate of Completion
Course Details
Time Commitment
Our courses include 90 minutes of live in-class time per week, as well as access to our online platform. Students should plan to spend 1–3 hours of time outside class completing missions, playing the course games, and completing the challenges.
Delivery
We utilize videoconferencing software for live classes. Course preparation and challenges can be found in our online learning management system.
Homework and Testing
Students complete online text-based missions which may include reading, images and infographics, interactive explorations, videos, and/or digital games to prepare for the live course. After the live course, students will complete challenges akin to a quiz to demonstrate their understanding. We do not administer a formal end-of-class test but rather measure student achievement through a mastery-based amalgamation of their work.
Schedule
This course is offered in the following format(s). Please note, shorter schedules indicate an accelerated pacing.
- 16 Weeks
- 8 Weeks
Books
Marco the Great and the Mystery of Phasville
Required
Course Description
In Honors Algebra, students will master the Cartesian Plane. Seeing the plane as nothing more than a game field, we'll use applicable analogies to form everything from linear, to polynomial, to rational functions and beyond.
Students begin by studying the game controls – how can we command our characters to move about the plane? Realizing a formation is nothing more than assigning our players to stations, we'll explore relations at the college-level to uncover when an order is dysfunctional before zoning in on functional orders including special relations such as 1:1 and onto.
Beginning with commanding their team to line up, our exploration will continue to build on various formations providing students with confidence in linear equations, before expanding to quadratics, polynomials, rational and radical functions, exponents and logarithms, and a basic introduction to sinusoidal functions.*
We will become proficient at creating orders, molding them using transformations to obtain the perfect shape and location, and building machines that return our players to their original form (inverse functions).
Throughout our investigation, students will develop a strong understanding of exponents (far outside of memorizing rules) and the decimal system. They will see the power of the parabola, harnessing the focus and directrix to build and control a Death Star (a parabolic mirror). While our focus will be on developing a deep understanding of functions, along the way we will also master equations, determining how to find where a player was sent, as well as determine the player knowing their station.
*Trigonometry is covered in depth in our Honors Geometry course, The Shape of Everything.