I started blogging about my teaching as a way to help me reflect on what I do in my classes. We worked on sequences in Precalc today. Here are three problems we worked on in class... well, at least we did the setup using the graphing calculator. It has been a long time since I have taught sequences, or Precalc for that matter, so I had to give myself a refresher over the weekend on how to use the calculator to facilitate some of the sequence operations we use to solve problems in the world. I had to download the TI-84 user manual and work through some examples to remind myself about these things. The screenshots that appear below I made using Jing and the TI-Smartview emulator. Essentially, this post is a reminder note for me on teaching sequences using the TI-84.

Roberta had $1525 in a savings account 2 years ago. What will be the value of her account 1 year from now,assuming that no deposits or withdrawals are made and that the account earns 6.9% interest compounded annually? Find the solution using both a recursive and an explicit formula.

Define the sequence recursively and graph the sequence
{-4, -8, -16, -32, -64, ...}.

A really big rubber ball will rebound 80% of its height from which it is dropped. If the ball is dropped from 400 centimeters, how high will it bounce after the sixth bounce?