This unit’s focus is on ways to describe situations that change. In the first part of the unit, students explore three ways of representing a changing situation: with a description in words, with a data table, and with a graph. These representations are compared to one another to elicit the strengths of each presentation.

Students learn to write symbolic expressions as a shorter, quicker way to give a summary of the relationship between two variables. After writing symbolic rules, students learn how to use graphing calculators to make tables and graphs for a given rule, which allows students to interpret and compare more data sets.