Math Exhibition
I presented the "Going Bananas" POW. To prepare for the exhibition my partners and I made a document and wrote down our roles for the exhibition. Then we all worked on the visual aids and the presentation together. Teaching the POW helped improve my understanding a lot because I had to know it like the back of my hand so I could explain it to other people without them getting confused
Cookies Unit
In the cookies unit, we had to solve various problems involving (mostly) graphing. I was pretty new to some of the ways we were told to solve these problems but after a couple practice problems, I was familiar with them and could solve them pretty easily. The central problem in this unit asked us to find the max profit a bakery could make given a certain amount of dough, time, space, and icing. The bakery would only be able to make a combination of plain and iced cookies. We had to make constraints using the constants they gave us and then graph a feasible region where every profit within the constraints resided. I mastered linear programming, finding profit lines, making feasible regions, and standard form graphing in this unit. I also learned that I should always label my work because at the end of the unit, I had a hard time finding all of the work that had to be put in my portfolio.
POW 5 Process
In this POW, we had to find the weight of 5 bales of hay. Two of the bales would be weighed at a time and the trick was to find the right weight for your bales so that when they were weighed with all the others, they added up to a certain number. When I first started working on this POW, I was guessing and checking all over the place. I would choose a number for bale one’s weight and then I would find another number for bale 2 that when added to b1, the sum would be 80. Next, I would try out all the equations for the problem (b1+b2=80, b1+b3=82 etc.) based on these two numbers. I got some help from Lauren and we noticed that b4 and b5 were the heaviest bales and when added together, the sum was 91. This meant the other bales couldn’t be too heavy or they would exceed the top weight of 91 prematurely. Eventually I narrowed the weight of bale 1 down to 39 kg. By finding the correct weight of bale 1, I was able to figure out all the other bale weights by adding bale 1 to all the others and finish the problem.