My older son started a new section in Art of Problem Solving’s Introduction to Algebra book today. The chapter begins to look at quadratics in a bit more depth. Given the question my son picked for today’s movie I assume that one of the topics will be completing the square. It is always interesting to see how a kid approaches an advanced topic before really knowing much about that topic.
The question asks you to find the minimum value of . Here’s his work:
After he finished his work I gave a really basic introduction to completing the square using this problem as an example: