Hello everyone!

This is my second to last Scimatics blog post for grade 8! Wow this year has really gone by fast i’m almost done my first high school year and it feels so crazy to almost be finished. So about this project. This project was mostly math based and a lot of the math was things we already had learned but, we basically just learned more about how to calculate different shapes and just learned more about the concept in general.

So I’ve mentioned a math concept -your line: what’s the concept Sydney?- well, the concept is… calculating surface area and volume! The end goal for this project was designing a shape that either had more volume or surface area. It’s a little weird because I haven’t mentioned what our driving question was yet and usually those are the main focus but, for this project we got to create our own driving questions and that was milestone 1 and that would be the perfect Segway into talking about the milestones of this project but instead I want to talk about the curricular competencies (I will talk through the milestones later though). 

Applying and innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through personal or collaborative approaches.

This competency for Scimatics is about how you focus in class and wether or not your distracted or distracting other while their trying to work. I think I’m pretty good at not talking in class I will admit that I do sometimes get a bit distracted by things but I try my best to ignore it. I think an area (ha get it cause this project was about surface area) that I could improve on is finding ways to help me focus even when the class is loud for example using headphones and turning on a white noise or something along those lines.

Reasoning and Analyzing: Model mathematics in contextualized experiences.

For this project this competency was about  design a 3D object that had 10 basic 3D shapes using the tinker cad app. I believe that my shape was very good, I used relatively complicated objects in my design and I had a lot of different shapes. Though there is always area for improvement and I think I could’ve added a few more shapes that were completely different and not just one shape in a different position. Even though it wasn’t in the criteria I think I should’ve made my shape a little prettier especially since one of the critiques I received was that my hot tub looked a bit like a dishwasher.

Communicating and Representing: Explain and justify mathematical ideas and decisions.

For this project this competency was about our measurements/calculations and how much detail we put into our final presentation and how we compared the surface area vs the volume. I think my calculations were very precise and I only had one correction I needed to make and that was just the conversion I did. I think I went in depth about my calculation and ratios in my presentation but, I think I could’ve spent a little more time taking about how I got the end results for my project I also think I should’ve explained a bit more about why I chose the driving question I did.

 

Milestone 1: Driving Question

This milestone is pretty self explanatory as we just created our driving question. Mr Gross gave us an example question with a space that we could fill in. During the project I found that I didn’t like my driving question so I changed it. It went form; ‘How can I design a swimming pool so that it is has maximum volume’ to ‘How can I design a hot tub so that it has maximum surface area?’. Like you’ll see in my presentation I should’ve kept the volume part of the first question.

 

Milestone 2: Models and Formulas

This milestone was where we handed in what our completed model looked like and the formulas that we would use in our calculations I had eight different formulas here they are:

I’m not going to show my model yet because I don’t want to spoil it for the presentation. 

 

Milestone 3: Calculations 

This milestone was just adding in the numbers to the formulas we found/wrote down. The only mishap I had with this milestone was that I didn’t convert the millimetres squared/cubed to meters squared/cubed correctly because when I went to convert them I thought I should’ve just converted millimetres to meters but my teacher corrected that. Otherwise my calculations were fine. Here they are: 

 

Milestone 4: Tinkercad Model

We skipped over this milestone for our project because it was just 3D printing the model out or building a replica of the model using cardboard so, we just skipped to milestone 5.

 

Milestone 5: Presentation

Now this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for… Our presentation!!! I’m going to put the keynote of our presentation below because unfortunately we don’t any videos of us presenting. Now you might be wondering why I’ve been writing like I’m 2 people well, it’s because I had a partner in this project her name’s Naomi. So, without further ado I hope you enjoy our presentation!

Ultimate Design Project Presentation

 

I hope you liked the presentation it would probably be more entertaining in person but, whatever. I also hope you enjoyed reading about my second to last Scimatics project in grade 8. See you next time!

Thanks again for reading -Sydney🙃