I originally devised these resources for first year university students studying biomedical sciences who needed a bit of a refresher about standard form and prefixes. They have also proven useful for me for A level biology so I am sharing them here in the hope they are useful for others.
The pdf documents below include some explanation and worked examples along with some questions and answers. The maths is situated in a lot of real-world biomedical science (I used to be a biomedical science researcher).
Writing very large and very small numbers in standard form and with prefixes (pdf)
Calculating with very large and very small numbers (pdf)
Resources on the Mathcentre website.
There are audiovisuals (based in Flash 😦 ) and some pdf “textbook-like documents” including Scientific Notation, Powers and Prefixes, Amount and Concentration: Making and Diluting Solutions; Understanding Equations: Using, Rearranging and Manipulating Equations; Logarithms and Exponential Equations. Link to mathcentre site is here.
Resources in Numbas.
I have produced* a number of resources in the Numbas system (numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk ) The links below require a login to Numbas (free, this is an open source maths assessment system). The questions have been grouped into formative tests which auto-mark and have feedback and 10 question tests which just auto-mark. Each time the question is used the numbers are changed in a random manner so students can do them as many times as they like. The tests can be downloaded and used in a VLE.
They can also be modified, adapted, reorganised etc as they are shared with a creative commons license. If you do use them please let me know – it’s nice to know! Any questions, please ask (@jennyakoenig on twitter).
1. Standard Form, Powers and Prefixes: FORMATIVE TEST
1. Standard Form, Powers and Prefixes: 10 QUESTION TEST
2. Concentrations and Dilutions: FORMATIVE TEST
2. Concentrations and dilutions: 10 QUESTION TEST
3. Understanding and Using Equations – FORMATIVE TEST
3. Understanding and Using Equations – 10 QUESTION TEST
Logarithms and Exponential Equations: FORMATIVE TEST
4. Logarithms and exponential equations 10 QUESTION TEST
- with thanks to Mathcentre, RLO-CETL and University of Cambridge for financial support for this project.
Dr Jenny A Koenig 