7 Summary

This week completes your study of patterns and formulas. Starting in Week 3 with describing a visual pattern and looking for number patterns in the famous Pascal’s triangle, you moved on to using word formulas and writing your own. Finally, you learned how to rearrange a word formula so that you could find out something new from it before taking a quick look at inequalities. These have been a busy two weeks as well as an important two weeks, as you’ve been developing skills that will stand you in good stead for any future studies that involve algebra. So, congratulations on making it to the end of another week. Next week will be all about using powers, and in particular how they can help to write very large and very small numbers concisely. See you there!

You should now be able to:

• understand how to read a spreadsheet
• understand how a spreadsheet is created
• use doing and undoing diagrams to change formulas
• interpret and use notation for inequalities.

You are now half way through the course. The Open University would really appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future improvement in our optional end-of-course survey, which you will also have an opportunity to complete at the end of Week 8. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.

You can now go to Week 5.