In this real-world math challenge, students use percent skills to shop smart at a tech store. They apply discounts, markups, and sales tax to build a tech bundle within a $150 budget, developing proportional reasoning and financial literacy.
TechWorld Challenge – Discounts, Markups & Smart Spending immerses students in a practical, real-world shopping scenario where they must make smart financial decisions using math.
Students act as savvy shoppers using a $150 gift card to purchase one item from each of three tech categories: headsets, smartwatches, and Bluetooth speakers. Each item comes with a deal—either a discount, markup, or no change. Students must calculate adjusted prices, apply sales tax, and justify their choices while staying under budget.
Students will apply their understanding of percent discounts, markups, and sales tax to solve a real-world budgeting problem. They will calculate adjusted prices, apply multi-step percent operations, and make purchasing decisions within a fixed budget, reinforcing proportional reasoning and financial literacy.
To support individualized learning and reduce copying, this worksheet is randomized. Each student receives different original prices, discount or markup percentages, and tax-inclusive totals. This ensures that while the structure remains the same, each student works with unique data—encouraging independent thinking and problem-solving.
💡 Tip: When assigning this activity to your classroom, you can optionally enable randomization to give each student a unique version of the problems. When you re-assign the same worksheet, each student will get a new set of questions, helping them master the content through repeated practice.
Understand that rewriting an expression in different forms in a problem context can shed light on the problem and how the quantities in it are related. *For example, a + 0.05a = 1.05a means that "increase by 5%" is the same as "multiply by 1.05."*
All 7.EE.A.2 activities →Solve multi-step real-life and mathematical problems posed with positive and negative rational numbers in any form (whole numbers, fractions, and decimals), using tools strategically. Apply properties of operations to calculate with numbers in any form; convert between forms as appropriate; and assess the reasonableness of answers using mental computation and estimation strategies. *For example: If a woman making $25 an hour gets a 10% raise, she will make an additional 1/10 of her salary an hour, or $2.50, for a new salary of $27.50. If you want to place a towel bar 9 3/4 inches long in the center of a door that is 27 1/2 inches wide, you will need to place the bar about 9 inches from each edge; this estimate can be used as a check on the exact computation*.
All 7.EE.B.3 activities →Use proportional relationships to solve multistep ratio and percent problems. Examples: simple interest, tax, markups and markdowns, gratuities and commissions, fees, percent increase and decrease, percent error.
All 7.RP.A.3 activities →
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