Encyclopedia Project
Through the encyclopedia project, I have learned that mathematics is used everywhere even if you don't expect it. From telling time to the construction of camera lenses to astronomy to predicting production costs, math is in everything. Languages and cultures die and fade but math continues to exist throughout everything. Math has been developed, improved, and used for thousands of years for many things. People have used math for everything from the construction of the colosseum to figuring out how our world works.
I learned from this project that math isn’t just a class. Math is in literally in everything that we do and is useful in every profession. From working a cash register to calculating business revenue to designing and constructing skyscrapers, math is used in every job that there is.
If I were to redo this project, I would use my class time more wisely and do more research. I was gone for much of this project and thought that I could just do the whole thing in the last few days. I was wrong. I managed to finish it in time by staying up late to finish it but I regret not taking advantage of the time I was provided with.
If I were to change the encyclopedia project, I would let the students see some examples of where math is used BEFORE they chose their topic. When the student has an idea about what kind of math they are going to be working with, ideas for their project will start flowing before they even start doing research. I found during this project that the best resource is interviews and I would advise a student next year to make sure to do at least one.
My greatest strength going into future math classes is my motivation to do a thorough job in everything I do. When I am provided with an opportunity to apply myself in order to make a cool project, I want to do it well. One example of this is the semester exam project. When creating one of my problems, I decided to solve 5 systems of equations. It took me two hours to complete and I filled out three pages of graph paper with equations. During this process, I never once thought about how much extra effort was going into this one problem. I only thought about how much fun I was having and how cool my problem was.
My greatest weakness going into future math classes is my lack of initiative in class. Often times, since I don't mind doing math work at home, I don't do anything in class. When I have other things to do after school, I end up getting behind. Next year, I am going to make sure to always get as much math done in class as possible in order to stay on top of all of my homework.
I learned from this project that math isn’t just a class. Math is in literally in everything that we do and is useful in every profession. From working a cash register to calculating business revenue to designing and constructing skyscrapers, math is used in every job that there is.
If I were to redo this project, I would use my class time more wisely and do more research. I was gone for much of this project and thought that I could just do the whole thing in the last few days. I was wrong. I managed to finish it in time by staying up late to finish it but I regret not taking advantage of the time I was provided with.
If I were to change the encyclopedia project, I would let the students see some examples of where math is used BEFORE they chose their topic. When the student has an idea about what kind of math they are going to be working with, ideas for their project will start flowing before they even start doing research. I found during this project that the best resource is interviews and I would advise a student next year to make sure to do at least one.
My greatest strength going into future math classes is my motivation to do a thorough job in everything I do. When I am provided with an opportunity to apply myself in order to make a cool project, I want to do it well. One example of this is the semester exam project. When creating one of my problems, I decided to solve 5 systems of equations. It took me two hours to complete and I filled out three pages of graph paper with equations. During this process, I never once thought about how much extra effort was going into this one problem. I only thought about how much fun I was having and how cool my problem was.
My greatest weakness going into future math classes is my lack of initiative in class. Often times, since I don't mind doing math work at home, I don't do anything in class. When I have other things to do after school, I end up getting behind. Next year, I am going to make sure to always get as much math done in class as possible in order to stay on top of all of my homework.
Semester Exam Project
I found the final exam project very fun as well as extremely helpful for reviewing everything we have studied. For me, this project was fun because I got to invent my own problems. Having to follow only a few guidelines, I was able to take my skills and use them in a totally new way in order to come up with creative, doable problems. By creating problems from each topic that we studied over the semester, I had to recall and remind myself in depth how to do each type of problem.
I am going to study for the semester exam by doing practice problems. Each study day, I am going to give myself a list of problems, a few from each chapter, and do them. If I do not know how to do them, I will go back into my comp book and find the section where I took notes on that topic. After analyzing my comp book, I will solve the problem, and if I think that I might have trouble with similar problems, I will solve a few more like it.
I feel that this semester has been successful in Algebra 2. For most of the things that we studied, I was able to Perfectly understand the content and complete all of the work. I was able to get an A on every test except for one of them on which I did very poorly. I could’ve hugely improved my score on this test by working harder to fully comprehend the content leading up to it. For this section, I feel that it would’ve been very helpful to do all of the extra practice problems. Even though I would’ve had more homework for these couple of weeks, I would’ve done much better on the test and I would be more confident coming into the final semester exam.
I am going to study for the semester exam by doing practice problems. Each study day, I am going to give myself a list of problems, a few from each chapter, and do them. If I do not know how to do them, I will go back into my comp book and find the section where I took notes on that topic. After analyzing my comp book, I will solve the problem, and if I think that I might have trouble with similar problems, I will solve a few more like it.
I feel that this semester has been successful in Algebra 2. For most of the things that we studied, I was able to Perfectly understand the content and complete all of the work. I was able to get an A on every test except for one of them on which I did very poorly. I could’ve hugely improved my score on this test by working harder to fully comprehend the content leading up to it. For this section, I feel that it would’ve been very helpful to do all of the extra practice problems. Even though I would’ve had more homework for these couple of weeks, I would’ve done much better on the test and I would be more confident coming into the final semester exam.