Have you ever wanted to start a business? I’m guessing you have, even if it was for a silly little idea you had had as a kid, I know I have. However, I’m willing to guess that you never actually executed that dream of selling those ‘cool friendship bracelets that you learn in grade 1 that one time’ as a job. But what if you did? What if you actually decided that you wanted to start you’re own business? Well there would be a lot that you would have to do to get that ball rolling but even before that you would want to know if you would even be making money right? Well that is exactly what my latest Scimatics project ‘Time is Money’ is about. We learned all about linear equations and how you can use them to track if you will make or lose money reletive to your business in a graph.
For this project we also used Curricular Competencies to help us achieve the best result we could. The first competency that we used was Understanding and Solving which is defined as: apply multiple strategies to solve problems in both abstract and contextualized situations. I think that I was able to improve my use of this competency during this project when it came to creating the spreadsheet for all the different data points we would use in our linear equation. The reason I think this is because when it came to calculating how much the materials I had used had cost I couldn’t just go online and say how much the whole amount of something cost because that would mess up the equation. Instead I decided to employ my previous knowledge surrounding math and figure out what fraction of the full product was used per batch based on the measurements of the recipe and the measurements on the product. I then divided the cost of the product by the amount that I had used and put that on the spreadsheet.
The next curricular competency that we used was Communicating and Representing which is described as: represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic form. I think I did a good job at using this competency in this project when creating my graphs as well as just explaining my use of my linear equation in my video. The reason I think this is because when I was writing my script for the video and creating the slides for the keynote I really wanted to communicate and show how much linear equations would help in a business setting. That’s also why I used the linear equation to show how bad of job this would be based off of just the numbers alone and also creating graphs to visually represent how long it would take to make a decent amount of money.
Finally the last competency that we used in this project was Connecting and Reflecting which is defined as: connecting mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests. This competency kind of ties in with the last one of where I was trying to show how bad this particular business would be for a full time job and the competency that I think I did the best on. The reason I think this is because through out the project I was thinking all about how much money I would actually be making and the amount of profit I would get for my work. Because of that I ended up focusing most of my final video on how bad of a job this business would be based off of all the calculations and visualized graphs that I had made. I also ended up comparing my business to others that would have a much better success rate and using that to really connect the math to the real world.