Hello again! Well, it’s more like a sad hello. This is my last Scimatics project and blog post. I really enjoyed this year. But I’m excited for next year. Hopefully school is back to normal (probably not) and I can go to Windsor like usual. Anyways, this is the blog post for our ULTIMATE ROAD TRIP!!! I’ve really liked this project. Personally, I like math more than science, so this project was pretty fun.

In it, we planned out our ULTIMATE ROAD TRIP!!! We got 10,000 dollars, and we had to plan everything. Rental car, hotels, food… For my trip, I “went” from Brisbane, Australia all the way up to Cairns, and then back to Brisbane. My trip took a total of 23 days, stopping at many places along the way!

 Here is a picture of the roadmap of how far I would go, and where I would stop! I really liked making this, as I’ve always wanted to go on a road trip in Australia. The car I chose was a Euro Star 4 Berth from Apollo Motorhomes AU, which is basically a really big camper-van! This way, I didn’t have to book hotels every night.

Here is what my budget looked like. The one time expenses are things that I would only have to buy once, and the Daily expenses were things that I needed to buy every day. After calculating all this, I put the information into the app Desmos, and got a nice chart of all the information! Here is the formula:

I’m very happy with how my project turned out, so here is what my graph looks like!

There were some Curricular Competencies in this project, so I’ll describe what they’re about, and how I think I did on them.

Reasoning and Analyzing: Estimate reasonably

I think I did pretty well on this competency. I think that I have a pretty good idea of how much things like restaurants cost, and I did look up a few in Australia to base my knowledge off of. I really like estimating, because you know a lot of numbers, and then you use the patterns and comparisons to estimate something else based off that!

Connecting and Reflecting: Connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interest. 

I believe that my total amount of money was just under 10,000 dollars. I experimented by changing the amount of days, and then seeing how much money I was spending. The first camper-van that I chose was very inexpensive, and my trip would have taken around 40 days.  So I changed my camper-van to a larger model that cost more money to rent. Not having to book a hotel every night really cut down on cost. I was able to plan a road trip that was unique to me, and I think if I actually went on it, it would be really fun! If a little warm.

Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms. 

I believe that the equation that I made is accurate, and I think that my graph is also correct. I really messed up on my equation at the start. I had the wrong numbers in the wrong places, and there was dividing instead of multiplying. I did really badly on this, but then my mom was looking at it, and helped me fix it. I think I need to improve a bit on making equations, as I also tend to mix up the letters that represent things. The total amount of days that I could go on my trip without running out of money is 23, but in a more precise version, it’s 23.4. I labeled the last day and the total cost on my graph as well.

Thanks for reading!

– Kate