What’s the ideal road trip? The most comfortable, and relaxing road trip ever? The most fun? These were all questions we had to consider in our most recent scimatics project. In this project, The Ultimate Road Trip, we had to plan out a full road trip with a budget of 10,000. When I heard about this, I knew there were a few things I wanted to do. The first one was I wanted to visit my friends in California, so that was my first destination. Next, I really wanted to go to Baja California, for no special reason, just because I felt like it! From then on, it was just random places that I wanted to go to, like LA, Salt Lake City, etc. I thought it would be really cool, but mostly just silly, to rent out a hockey rink and gear everyday. I had to fill in around $2,000 dollars, and I found that renting a rink costs around $200 a day, and my trip was 14 days, so that was perfect.
Competencies:
For this project, our core competencies were: reasoning and analyzing, connecting and reflecting, and finally, communicating and representing. The first one, reasoning and analyzing, basically means reasonably estimating, which I think I did pretty well this project. The main reason I think this is because for my total price of my project, I was only around 100 dollars off of the budget! My final price was $9,938. I think my estimation skills were on point with this project because in the first add up of all my costs, I was only 62 dollars off. The next competency was connecting and reflecting, which was about connecting mathematical concepts to each other and to personal interests. I think that I did this really well because I used my math skills to help me fulfill my interests, like visiting Baja California, LA, etc. Finally, the third competency was communicating and representing, which meant we had to represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms, and I think I did a good job at doing this.
Milestones:
For this project, there were 6 milestones, this blog post being the last. The first milestone was pretty easy and straightforward. We had to choose a vehicle like a sports car, a truck, and find out how much it would cost to rent it out, and that was pretty much it. I chose an rv, that would cost just under $60 per night, that was extremely big. Now that sounds pretty easy, but that was just a distraction for milestone 2! The second milestone was math practice that may have been long, and slightly boring, it was very necessary, and helpful. After the practice, we had a short quiz on it for milestone 3, and it wasn’t too difficult, although the font was pretty small, and hard to read. The forth milestone is very really starting to work on the project. For this milestone we had to calculate the cost for our road trip. This took not as long as I thought it was because my cost was very close to the budget on the first try. For the 5th milestone, we basically just had to Make an equation for our budget, make a graph for our equation, and then make a map showing our ripped on a dream make an equation for our budget, make a graph for our equation, and then make a map showing our route on our trip. Here is my equation and my graph:
And here is my map:
Overall, I think that this project was the perfect balance between fun and learning. I had fun, but I also learned a lot, and I’m really glad that we did this project.