Google by the Numbers and Googol

This lesson was all about the large number of Google. We started with looking at the valuation of the two largest companies in the world, Apple ($667.5 billion) and Google ($486.4 billion). We then discussed the concept of sales, expenses, and profits of Google ($13 billion in profits on $66 billion in sales). We looked at the net worth of the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin which increased by 20% or 1/5 in the last year from $30 billion each to $36 billion. The children were amazed that these entrepreneurs take a salary of only $1 per year. See the Google by the Numbers pdf.

 

The second challenge was looking at the number that inspired the name of Google: 10^100 or googol. We focused on understanding decimal and how to comma a number to understand its size. The second pdf has several numbers including googol, Avogadro’s number, world population, and other demographics. I would like to challenge the children to comma each number and name each number by the -illions. After the children placed the commas in the number googol they were able to determine that this number’s Latin root is called 10 duotrigintillion. I tried to impress on the children that this number does not make sense since the total particles in the universe are “only” 10^79.

 

There was a bonus challenge to have the children understand the population growth rate on a daily and annual basis.

 

Finally, the children should continue to create their Google Doodles. This is not time critical as they do not have to submit their submissions until December 7th.

AttachmentSize
Google_by_the_Numbers.pdf329.68 KB
Googol_and_Large_Numbers.pdf718.27 KB