Staff

Please select a resource from the list below.

Teach Yourself

• Completing the square
  It is often useful to be able write a quadratic expression in an alternative form - that is as a complete square plus or minus a number. The process for doing this is called completing the square. This booklet explains how this process is carried out.

Test Yourself

• Diagnostic Test - Completing the square 1
  Diagnostic test for completing the square. (1 of 2)
• Diagnostic Test - Completing the square 2
  Diagnostic test for completing the square. (2 of 2)
• Exercise - Completing the square
  Online exercise on completing the square

Video

A transcript of each video should be available in the Teach Yourself section above.

(This site uses Windows Media technologies from Microsoft to deliver video streams. Streaming facilities are kindly provided by University of Portsmouth Creative Technologies, http://stream.port.ac.uk)

These videos require Windows Media Player (v10).

Please note: You may experience trouble with more recent upgrades to Internet Explorer (now v.7) and Media Player (now v.11). These no longer support streaming from the mms servers used by mathcentre, so we are recommending that you uninstall IE7 (IE6 lies underneath) and replace the new version of WMP with the fully functioning v.10 (you may need to find a download via google after uninstalling v.11). All those that have done this have reported back that everything is working again.

• Completing the Square - By Inspection
  In this unit we consider how quadratic expressions can be written in an equivalent form using the technique known as completing the square. This technique has applications in a number of areas, but we will see an example of its use in solving a quadratic equation. (Mathtutor Video Tutorial)