Lesson Plan: Elementary Row Operations Mathematics
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to perform elementary row operations on a matrix and reduce matrices into upper triangular form in order to calculate determinants more easily.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- perform the following row operations on a matrix:
- swapping two rows ,
- scaling a row ,
- adding a scaled row to another row ,
- identify whether two matrices are row equivalent or not,
- recall the effects that row operations will have on the determinant of the matrix,
- reduce a matrix into upper triangular form using row operations,
- calculate the determinant of a matrix by using row operations to facilitate the process.
Prerequisites
Students should already be familiar with
- finding the determinant of a matrix,
- upper triangular matrices.
Exclusions
Students will not cover
- reduced row echelon form,
- augmented matrices,
- finding the inverse of a matrix using row operations,
- solving a system of equations using row operations.
