The purpose of this lesson is to practice some skills that students will be expected to use in the associated Algebra 1 lesson:

• Check if a relationship is linear or exponential (by subtracting and dividing successive outputs).
• Create a scatter plot using technology.
• Create a model to fit the scatter plot, even if the data is a bit messy.

Although students aren’t engaging in the full modeling cycle in these activities, they are building up some of the skills that are needed to successfully model situations like these with mathematics (MP4). These skills include deciding on an appropriate type of model, constructing a model, and seeing how well the model fits the data.