Alternate Technology Assignment for Medical Insurance Project

I get more interest in the medical insurance projects than any other project on this website. I use two different versions of the project in my classes. In College Algebra, I use the Medical Insurance 2 Project. I have student compare two different plans to decide which is cheaper. In Business Calculus, I use the Medical Insurance 3 Project where students model an insurance plan and prove it is continuous. These project share a number of technology assignments. The second one that students complete is Technology Assignment: Calculate the Total Annual Cost (DOC | PDF). For my students, this is usually the hardest assignment of the semester. It is a collision between insurance terminology (which they have no clue about) and Excel (which they also have no clue about). To find a model more efficiently, I needed to tone down the Excel component and ramp up the insurance component. Continue reading “Alternate Technology Assignment for Medical Insurance Project”

Tax Rates in NC and LA

The activity I describe in the post on Continuous Tax Functions may be linked to real data to make an extended class activity. In this extension, students need to come up with the piecewise continuous function for a state. Once they have the function, they prove that it is continuous using the definition of a continuous function.
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Continuous Tax Functions

One of the disadvantages of using projects in a course is the time it takes to administer and grade. For many faculty members with large class sizes or large amounts of content to cover, it is not feasible to do a project over several weeks. Fear not! You can still incorporate realistic applications in your classes as activities.
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