Excel Interactive Resource: Interactive Division
Age 11 to 16
Challenge Level
This Excel
file just lightens the computation burden for division,
allowing the teacher and student to discuss the process and explore
the relationships between the process elements.
Some terms: the Dividend (quantity to be divided) is divided by the
Divisor to produce a Quotient with possibly a Remainder.
Personally, I like to have some investigative activity somewhere in
the mix, whatever I'm teaching.
Here's a few starter ideas for division (clearly depending on the
level of your students):
- You may wish to draw attention to the change in remainder as
the dividend increases in steps of 1 or in divisor-size steps.
- For a specific divisor, ask students for a dividend that gives
a specific remainder. For example: ask students to choose a
dividend between 210 and 220, which when divided by 6, gives a
remainder of 3.
- For divisors of 3, and also of 9, invite students to notice a
connection between the dividend's digit sum (the sum of the digits
in the dividend) and the remainder. And then to account for the
relationship observed.