Hello everybody! It’s that wonderful time again where I am done (almost in this case) a project! But what project have I been doing? Well, as you might have guessed from the title, it’s called Mazer tag. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the basics. The goal of this project was/is to understand Pythagorean’s theorem and the laws of reflection. Well, here’s a sneak peak at the end result.

This is the version without the lasers turned on.

Back to the start. First we started with learning about Pythagorean’s theorem. We started by reading some textbooks on the Pythagorean’s theorem and reflections.

To summarize, A2+B2=C2 (I couldn’t make a little 2, but you know that it’s supposed to mean squared) this is the formula to make a right angled triangle.

For reflection, we learned that there is an invisible line in the middle of mirrors, and when light hits a side of it, the angle will be the same on either side.                     (We did learn a bit more than that)

It all started by asking lots of questions and recording what we know on these 2 topics. We recorded it in our “project start mind map”. Here is mine:

These were the questions I was trying to think about while making my project.

Big Idea: That you use the light of layers to create a triangle. I think we, my group, did pretty good job of doing this. We were able to calculate the third side of the triangle by using Pythagorean theorem, and the lasers were pretty clear that it was a triangle.

Competencies:

Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms. 2 sides of our triangle were measured, and we were able to get the third side of the triangle by using Pythagorean’s theorem. I think that we also showed this by having a poster that had: Pythagorean’s theorem, our equation, and a picture of our triangle.

Co-operatively design projects. Each member of our group helped a lot on building our project. We were able to communicate what we wanted to do and agree on a solution that looked good and made us all happy. Also on the day we were presenting it, we all helped set up our project and make sure all the lasers were turned on.

Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of a personal interest. I am very proud of the work that I did on our project. I think it looks really good and I spent most of the class time we had to work on it. I think I could have probably done a tiny bit more constant work, but I am proud that I worked on it for around three weeks, and it turned out the way we wanted. Sometimes I did get a bit frustrated and needed to take a break, but I always was able to work around, or fix the problem.