The applet is used to explore the shape of the gradient function of exponential functions [math]y = a^x[/math] and draw attention to a special value of [math]a[/math] (i.e. [math]e[/math]) which leads to the gradient being equal to the original function. This could be used as part of an introduction to the exponential function and its derivative and integral for the A-level OCR Core 3 module.
