In the fall of 2024, Citizen Math released updated versions of every lesson in our library, plus a few new ones! We know you may have already prepped an earlier version or planned a repeat of last year, so we're continuing to make these earlier versions available through Thursday December 5, 2024.
You can find the new lessons through the regular search, and we hope you love them as much as we do. You can read more about these updates in Our Community.
Click here for the updated version of this lesson!
In 2004, Facebook launched to little fanfare. Today, approximately 25% of the world’s population uses it every month, and Facebook describes its mission as to create a "global community for bringing people together."
In this lesson, students write a quadratic function to model the number of possible connections between users on a social network. They use information about how Facebook has grown over time to determine how the number of connections has changed, and discuss whether this technology is expanding our perspectives or reinforcing those we already have.
