Business, Administration and Entrepreneurship (Other sources of ideas)
A collection of resources which provide ideas and inspiration for teaching mathematics in the context of business, administration and entrepreneurship. The resources included in this collection require some adaptation to make them appropriate for the particular audience.
Where Does Your Money Go?
In this activity students investigate how families spend their money by using a Family Spending report. Students plot appropriate graphs using ICT, interpret data from tables and graphs and understand where the average family spend their money including looking at the cost of living. Students should also begin to consider personal finances and how to manage money.
Compound Interest
This activity shows how compound interest can be calculated over different intervals. As the intervals get smaller and smaller, the total value approaches a limit. Topic areas covered are:
• Use of different time intervals for compounding interest
• Multipliers for percentage change
• Compound interest formula
• The exponential function as a limit of increasingly frequent compounding
• Annual Equivalent Rate (AER)
• Annual Percentage Rate (APR)
• Gross interest
• Net interest
• Use of different time intervals for compounding interest
• Continuous compounding
Credit Cards
This activity shows students how to use a recurrence relation to work out how long it takes to pay off a credit card loan and how much it costs. They can use a graphic calculator or spreadsheet to do the working.
After working through the given example, where a customer spends £1250 and repays £80 per month at a monthly interest rate of 1.2%, students are asked to investigate how long it would take to pay off another debt with different rates of interest or different regular payments.
Modelling with Spreadsheets
Modelling with Spreadsheets explains the principles of modelling and the use of spreadsheets. The applications are mainly in the business/economics area and illustrate how modelling can be used to inform decision makers.
:Modelling with a spreadsheet - provides an explanation of modelling in physical environments, such as wind tunnels and flight simulators, as well as the use of computer models for theoretical principles and logical assumptions.
Airline optimisation - presents an investigation of the consequences of altering the price charged for a plane journey, to establish what would be the best fare to charge. It uses information from a market research department and explains that, although the modelling process is a very powerful planning tool, no model is perfect and there is an art in using them effectively.
Analyses to try yourself - opportunities are provided to set up models based on background information similar to the airline investigation and include:
• The Orange Grove
• The Trucking Problem
• Selling Pocket Electronic Games
Optimising stock levels - frequent deliveries increases administrative costs, but if deliveries are made less often a large number of items have to be kept in stock and this is expensive too. The process of optimisation balances the trade-off between these two types of costs.
Warehouse location - positioning a warehouse is a classic problem and is studied in Human Geography and in Business Economics. There are a variety of approaches to finding the best location but spreadsheet techniques make it possible to explore this kind of analysis in a simple way.
Modelling traffic flow - applies the stopping distances of vehicles, given in the highway code, to the management of traffic speed through road works on the motorway to give the greatest flow of traffic along a single lane.
Processes and principles in modelling and optimisation - explains the ideas and principles which are characteristic of the activities described in this book and, although most of the ideas in this chapter have been introduced previously, they have been set out here to provide an overview.
Business, Administration and Entrepreneurship
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