Excel for Math Classes: Pascal's Triangle

Explores some patterns in Pascal's Triangle using Excel, including using conditional formatting to make a Sierpinski triangle. Excel Level: Beginning Plus (introduces conditional formatting). Math Level: Elementary - College.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Pascal's
• Triangle
• math
• class
• excel
• Sierpinski
• conditional
• formatting

[dborkovitz]

You're very welcome. Glad it helped

[Gniruks]

thank you! i'm an IB student in germany, and this video was brilliant for me

[dborkovitz]

Glad you liked it, thanks for commenting.

[technicolour1]

I loved this tutorial and used it with a Y7 class in England.  They loved the patterns and it finished off our work on sequences really well. The only problem is that excel will only allow 3 conditional formats so we got stuck at mod 3. Do you know a way around this?

[dborkovitz]

Glad the video worked well with your class!

As far as I know, you only get three colors. It can be hard to see patterns with too many colors, though. If you use two colors with higher mods, "is equal to" 0 (light) and "is not equal to" 0 (dark), you can see patterns clearly, especially if you make the cells even smaller and use more rows.... or try variations.

In my Sieve of Eratosthenes II video I show how to use AND and OR to assign multiple values to each color.

Good luck!

[missyemail]

We loved the video demonstration. Jeremy thought that it was very cool and we are going to try to replicate it ourselves on Excel. Great video Debbie.

[dborkovitz]

Thanks for my first comment! Glad you liked it, let me know how it goes.

[Shaitan2323]

thx a lot! It really helped me :)

[missyemail]

We tried this on Excel and it worked perfectly. We changed the colors a lot and made it really big. The kids were super impressed. Thanks.