Foundations of Real World Math

“Why is math important? Why do I have to learn math?” These are typical questions that you have most likely asked at one time or another in your education.

While you may learn things in math class that you will not use again, the study of mathematics is still an important one for human development. Math is widely-used in daily activities (e.g. shopping, cooking, etc.) and in most careers (e.g. medicine, teaching, engineering, construction, business, statistics in psychology, etc.). Math is also considered a “universal language.” One of the fundamental reasons why you learn math is to help you tackle problems, both mathematical and non-mathematical, with clear, concise, and logical steps. In this course, you will study important fundamental math concepts.

Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Apply properties of operations as strategies to add and subtract.
• Apply properties of operations as strategies to multiply and divide.
• Explain how negative numbers are used together to describe quantities having an opposite direction.
• Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving the four operations(including fractions and decimals).
• Find the greatest common factor and least common multiple of whole numbers.
• Recognize a fraction as part of a whole.
• Explain equivalence of fractions.
• Use equivalent fractions as a strategy to add and subtract fractions with like and unlike denominators.
• Solve word problems involving addition and subtraction of fractions referring to the same whole and having like and unlike denominators.
• Determine how to solve multiplication and division of fractions problems.
• Solve real world problems involving multiplication and division of fractions.
• Use decimal notation for fractions.
• Read, write, and compare decimals.
• Perform operations with multi-digit whole numbers and withdecimals to hundredths.
• Solve multi-step real-life and mathematical problems posed with decimals.
• Use ratio concepts to solve problems.
• Analyze proportional relationships, and use them to solve real-world and mathematical problems.
• Convert between percent, decimal, and fraction notation.
• Use proportional relationships to solve multistep percent problems.
• Represent and interpret data in various graphs.

Primary Resources: This course is composed of a range of different free, online materials.  However, the course makes primary use of the following materials:

• Salman Khan’s Khan Academy Mathematics Videos
• College of the Redwoods: Department of Mathematics’ Pre-Algebra Textbook, 2^nd edition (Note: there is a detailed Solutions Manual for the odd problems within the textbook)
• Denny Burzynski and Wade Ellis’ Fundamentals of Mathematics

Course Designer: Eric Clark

Price: Free