A Celestial Dance

This Instructional Activity is a part of the Lesson 15, Unit 7, Grade 8. In this activity, students add quantities written in scientific notation in order to answer questions in context. To add numbers in scientific notation, students must attend to precision by aligning place value. As students work, notice the different strategies used to align place value. One strategy would be to convert all the distances to decimal, align the place values vertically, and then add in the usual way. Another example would be to rewrite all the addends to use the same power of 10 before adding.