I believe that an essential practice in mathematics is using patterns to break down complicated, abstract ideas into smaller, more understandable ones. Once that level of understanding has been achieved, students can more easily see the connections between topics. This is exactly what happens in this unit as students move from discovering exponent rules to simplifying exponential expressions to simplifying expressions using scientific notation. The interconnectedness of those topics will hopefully become apparent to students, since they will have already deeply explored and understood the core thread (the exponent rule) that weaves them together.

I also believe that mathematics needs to be contextualized in the real-world. As students explore scientific notation, they get the chance to see how it can be useful in different real-world situations that entail really large or really small numbers, and how it makes comparing those quantities much easier.