Finite Math with Excel


This represents work supported in part by NSF grant  DUE-IUSE-1625222
The goal of the grant was to make math education more effective for business students.

One of the sub-projects of the grant was to produce a text and course for a true Business Calculus course, with the assumption being that students would have laptops and would use an Excel spreadsheet as their primary computational engine.  The open source, online text, Business Calculus with Excel is the result.

A second sub-project was to have a flavor of College Algebra aimed at business students.  In particular, the course was to have a greater emphasis on modeling.  The idea is that the problems will routinely have the structure of starting with a collection of data, choosing an appropriate mode for the situation, finding the formula that best fits the model to the data, an then answering questions about the function defined by that formula.

A third sub-project looked at modifications to a finite math course, taken mainly by business students, to use Excel when appropriate

This is consistent with the recommendations of the MAA CRAFTY committee's Curriculum Foundations Project (CFP).  While the material was developed for business students, the material should work with minor adaptation for any modeling based Finite Math  course that uses spreadsheets.


Worksheets - The modeling skills were developed with a series of 7 worksheets.  With each worksheet, the students spent the class period working  in groups. They finished outside of class and turned in completed assignments one week later.  The course assumed the students had no prior experience with Excel.
  1. Section 1-3, Goal seek and intersecting curves.
  2. Section 1-4 Linear Modeling
  3. Section2-3 Matrix Multiplication
  4. Section 6-2 Assigning probabilities (Counting from a data set)
  5. Section 7-1 Visualizing Data with Excel (has a data file)
  6. Section 10-2 Annuities and Bank Balances
  7. Section 10-4 Financial decisions (With Loan Setup worksheet)

If you are interested in using this material in a class, please let me know.

Mike May
mike.may@slu.edu