Spreadsheet Math: Teaching high school students how to use spreadsheets

While I have tried to nurture a number of 21st century skills in my classes over the years, never have I done so with such defined purpose as this year. After experimenting a little with using spreadsheets to execute annoyingly tedious mathematical computations common to precalculus last year, I decided to make developing proficiency with spreadsheets a primary objective of my class this year.

This decision did not just come about on a whim however. Specifically, there were two events of consequence that enlightened me of the the great untapped power of spreadsheets. The first was a template a colleague of mine had devised for generating customized narrative reports regarding the performance of our students while I was working at a small school in China.

His template required little more than inputting a name, a grade, and a few numbers (I think it may have been three or four), and suddenly a completely personalized full page report came out accurately describing the student’s performance in each grading category of the syllabus, plus any additional comments we may have wanted to include. It really wasn’t that complicated, just a few vLookup and if statements, but to the unknowing it was a level of wizardry that made even Harry Potter seem amateur.

The second event of consequence was having taken an online course on Model Thinking from the University of Michigan through Coursera. Despite not being a math class, I found that many of the models in this course could be generated mathematically and more easily executed by using spreadsheets. Thus, if non-mathematical models can be simulated using spreadsheets, then actual mathematical models should be easy, and with a few fundamentals, they are.

In the series that follows (a new entry every 2–4 weeks), you will see how I have used Google Sheets (as well as a few other internet tools) not only to facilitate the learning of precalculus concepts (although one could easily tailor these activities to other classes as well), but also equip my students with tools to give them a leg up in modern academia and industry over their contemporaries, as these are skills that otherwise unknown, let alone introduced, in K-12 education.