Now imagine that your task is not just to solve the tiles problem but to talk about the problem with a friend on the phone. If you were describing the pattern, how would you do it?

• What would you say to enable your friend to build the first four terms? What about the 10^th term?
• How many ways can you determine if your friend has found a correct functional rule?
• Could you know whether your friend had created the pattern correctly?
• How might you communicate differently if you were writing instructions down and mailing them to your friend?
• How does this communication help you and your friend think about the mathematics in this problem? In particular, the relationship between the number of the term (n) and the number of tiles (T) needed to build the term.
• Can you imagine different descriptions of the pattern and the process to build more terms?

  See another way of representing and communicating about this problem