Folding Paper and Exponential Growth

I've shared my thoughts about TED-Ed and flipped classrooms in the past so I'll spare you the details (you can find them here and here if you like) and just say that I think that in the right situation TED-Ed and other video lessons can be helpful as introductory or review materials for students. This evening I spent a little time on TED-Ed after writing this post about NASA's moon phases animation. I started out looking for videos about the moon and ended up watching a video about exponential growth.

In How Folding Paper Can Get You to the Moon students are introduced to the concept of exponential growth. The context for the lesson is the question of how many times would you have to fold a piece of paper to reach the moon?