# Using an AB Calculus question as a estimation problem for kids

Last night I was curious what the AP calculus questions looked like and was flipping through the multiple choice questions from the 2012 AB calculus exam.

This one caught my eye because I felt that the wrong choices weren’t selected very well and the correct answer was obvious from the choices:

Despite not liking the question so much for a calculus exam, I thought it would make a pretty neat estimation problem for kids. My older son was looking at exponentials and logarithms this week anyway, so using this question as an estimation problem sort of fit in naturally with what he was doing anyway this week.

I started off today’s project by introducing the problem and asking the kids how they would approach it.

My younger son had a bit of a difficult time understanding the problem – which wasn’t a big surprise. My older son wanted to start by estimating what the square root of e was. Not the starting idea I was expecting, but it made for a good estimating problem:

Now that we we’d guessed that $e^{x/2}$ would look a lot like $1.65^x$ we decided to draw the region.

My younger son thought that the region would be a trapezoid – my older son thought it would be more of a curved shape.

Now that we had the shape drawn, we could estimate the area. We actually used the idea that it was nearly a quadrilateral to make that estimate.

Finally, we used our estimate of the area (3.71 square units) to see if we could identify the correct answer from the choices given in the original problem: