Week 10

fractal broccoli

Congratulations to all those who did well in the recent Algebra topic test!

We are ready now to move on to new topics. John's group is doing more work with number calculations. The Hammer group is spending a little time with some more advanced Algebra - doing binomial expansions, and then hopefully factorising polynomials.

How to do a binomial expansion? It is just multiplying one 'expression' with another 'expression':

(a + 2) x (b + 3)

The trick is to multiply everything in the first expression by everything in the second (don't leave any bit out)

= a x b + a x 3 + 2 x b + 2 x 3
= ab + 3a + 2b + 6

Don't get too stressed about this - we will do lots of practice, and as a bonus there will be no assignment over the holidays, so relax your brain and enjoy!