The Likeness of Terms

Hey guys, for the last couple of weeks we’ve been working on a new project in scimatics that was centred around like terms and polynomials. This project was really open ended and allowed for a lot of freedom in what we would do for our product. What we had to do was make a driving question that was based around polynomials and create a product that answered our driving question and show how we used polynomials and like terms in our product. I was partnered with Meg and the driving question we came up with was: How can we use a physical object that changes shape to teach others about polynomials? Our answer to this question was a box that could be taken apart and put back together to show a visual representation of polynomials.

This project of course had curricular competencies that we had to use and as always you can always improve your use of these competencies which is why we always need to reflect on how we use them. The first competency we used in this project was Communicating and Representing; this competency is used to communicate and represent mathematical ideas in a understandable way. I think I could have improved in my use of this competency because my presentation wasn’t the best at getting our point across of how you could use our creation to teach polynomials to others. I think that one way I can improve my use of this competency is to know exactly what points I want to talk about before presenting since right before presenting we changed a part of our presentation plan. I can do this by planning ahead and using specific talking points instead of a script.

The next competency I’d like to talk about is connecting and reflecting; this competency focuses on connecting these mathematical concepts to others and personal interests. I think that we were great at using this competency because when coming up with what we wanted to do for this project, we ended up creating a product that was somewhat based on our personal interests in puzzle solving and building. I think I will continue to use this competency in my other projects as well because creating something that interests you is much more enjoyable to do than to create something you couldn’t care less about.

The third competency I’ll talk about is the Understanding and Solving competency; this competency is based around actually understanding the math and solving problems by using your understanding of the math. I believe that I understand this math very well and am fairly good at using this competency to solve problems using my knowledge. However, I think I still need to work on using my understanding of problems and mathematical concepts in the real world.

The final competency I’d like to talk about is the Applying and Innovating competency; this competency focuses on actually using the resources given to you to solve problems and innovate new things or ways of doing things. I think I did pretty well at using this competency since one of the resources given to us was the time in class we had to work with our partners to create our product. I used this competency to continuously work with Meg during class to improve our idea until it was at our standards. I would like to work on using this competency more however, because I found once we had worked out the tweaks in the main thing we were doing we didn’t work as hard as I would have liked to.