8.EE.4

8.EE.4. Perform operations with numbers expressed in scientific notation, including problems where both decimal and scientific notation are used. Use scientific notation and choose units of appropriate size for measurements of very large or very small quantities (e.g., use millimeters per year for seafloor spreading). Interpret scientific notation that has been generated by technology.

From Bryan Meyer's Blog [|here]:

We decided that if we wanted kids to talk, they needed to have something rich and complex to talk about and make sense of. After brainstorming some different options, we turned the computational question into a conceptual one by asking:

Of course, this also opens up a host of interesting extensions... "what about the smallest product?" "what if we divide instead? biggest result? smallest? "what if one of the exponents was negative? both?" "what if we move the decimal point?" ...and many others.

[|Stars in The Universe- Robert Kaplinsky]- use this as an introduction for the need to write numbers in scientific notation as well as calculate with them.