Category: Math 3 Honors

I specifically learned what statistically significant meant. Before, I would just look that the means of data and if one was higher, or higher enough, then I would conclude there was a significant difference. I understand now that you need to run a large amount of randomization tests and compare if the original mean is within the most extreme 5%.

For this project, we first had to come up with what we wanted to test. This was honestly the hardest part, because we really had to idea what to do. After quite a bit of consideration, and some inspiration from some classmates, we decided on the color influence experiment. Next, we decided how we wanted to test it. We choose to use a Google Form so it would be easy to distribute them to participants and collect data in one place.

One part of the project that did turn out very well was our data collection design. The idea of the Google form was very easy to use to get participants. We didn’t find people at lunch and use their time to do it, so we got a fairly large amount of respondents. We could post announcements on our messaging platforms and find quite a few people there.

One thing that didn’t go well was the presentation. My partner and I did not have communications over the weekend as she did not have internet, and she didn’t know what we had to present on Monday, so we barely had time to prepare. We had a bit of miscommunication during the presentation, but it wasn’t too bad. It just wasn’t very smooth. Next time, I would make sure we had reliable communication to avoid something like this from happening again.

I learned that the hours of daylight throughout the year actually follow an exact cycle. Growing up, hours of daylight always affected my family, since my dad had vision issues and could not drive in the dark. Learning exactly when and how the time of day changed was a very educational experience. I never knew what the seasonal equinoxes were before.

To model the data for our project, we had to manually find each day of the year that were the 1/8th milestones of 365 days. Then, for those 8 dates plus the 4 equinoxes, we had to, again, manually search how many daylight hours each day had. It was a very tedious process and my partner and I very nearly messed some of our data. Then, we had to figure out how to write our model equation, which was difficult because we were confusing our radians and degrees. This whole process was the hardest part of the project. In the end, however, it mostly worked out; we just had to focus our effort, time, and concentration onto this part of the project. One thing that helped was having one teammate read off numbers and have the other put them in, so the latter would not have to keep switching around and risk entering incorrect data. It was also much easier and faster than having only one person do it at a time. Everything else, like the poster, was not really difficult compared to that.

One good thing about this project was our poster. This was the first time I ever developed a poster theme from scratch (though it was inspired by a infographic design and has similar elements). It has a very clean look, with effective use of background images. My grade level poster also used the same theme, and I worked on both posters alongside one another.

One thing I would do differently next time is to put all of our information on the poster. When we made the poster, we assumed that some of the rubric’s requirements could be left on our project documents, since it did not explicitly state that everything had to be on our poster. As a result, we missed many points.

I realized during this project that volume of non-standard 3D shapes is often very difficult to manage. Given a 10 oz. requirement, we first had to convert that into a cubic volume requirement, then guess and check several dimensions to finally find a size that was functional. All the heights, lengths, bases, slant lines, etc. that we had to manage all at the same time was very difficult.

One specific detail I learned was how to calculate the volume of a milk carton. The bottom part was easy; a simple rectangular prism, but the top triangle part was confusing. This led to a miscalculation in volume. At first, I calculated a volume with over 40 cubic centimeters over what we needed, which left us plenty of space. Then I realized that the triangle was not a triangular prism and could not be counted as one; after a bit of thinking, I then realized that it was actually a pyramid! the slanted faces of the carton and the slanted triangle on the sides formed a square-based pyramid with the height of the triangular prism. Even after that, I realized that the diagonal folds were reducing the height, and accounting for that I found the true volume to be exactly our initial goal, with 0.1 ounces to spare. I was very lucky that I made the design larger than I thought I needed, because in the end, it was exactly what we were required to make.

That was the greatest challenge of the project: handling all the numbers. I am prone to random mistakes, and in calculating the numerous volumes and areas I made several errors. In the end, I had to go back and fix them all last minute. Next time, I will have another team member double check all my numbers before I move forward, as to prevent another total do-over again.

But in the end, our project was a success in what it outputted. Our milk carton was very solid, functional, and good looking. Our presentation was effective in presenting all our information in a concise, non-overwhelming manner. I was able to use my design not just in a slideshow, but on a physical product.

An interesting fact I learned about Castlerigg (and one of the reasons I choose this circle) is that this stone circle predates infamous Stonehenge by 2 centuries. As for mathematics, I learned how to convert degrees to physical distance. Once Mrs. Parker explained how the minutes and seconds worked, I finally understood why they were called minutes and seconds; they were on a 60 scale.

But the hardest part of this project was the video; it required dozens of videos and images to compile into a 6 minute video. Then after hours of work on putting the video together, I needed to cite all 38 links. But with planning and time management we were able to complete all we needed on schedule, having eliminated other tasks to allow time to finish it all. But next time I would start grabbing plenty of images and videos from the very beginning and make sure we had all the content first; otherwise, we will have to re-render the video again and again with all the changes we had to make.

One thing that did turn out very well though was our poster; with experience from both my partner and I we were able to create a very attractive and clean poster design that accurately captured the theme of the stone circle.

This unit we had a Cartoon Project where we were tasked to explain some concepts about polynomials in a cartoon format. We already understood the material in this unit, but that was not the goal of this project; we now were supposed to present that knowledge in an easy-to-understand format. The hardest part of this project was actually focusing on it, as it was assigned during our grade level project. I found it very difficult to prioritize working on it while we had all the other work looming over us. While this project never really demanded much time, I know I could have done better given more effort. On most projects I go all in and cover as many points as possible but it felt impossible for this one.

Nonetheless, our final result did not look bad. Our presentation looked decent, and thanks to a teammate, we had nice little characters to base our cartoon around. Our slideshow’s theme was fairly simple but pleasant. I probably would have executed a makeover given more time but I didn’t.

Next time I need be able to focus more on this project. In an ideal situation I would be assigned one project at a time, but given that nobody ever gets it all their way, I will need to be able to multitask between multiple projects at once. While in this situation the Grade Level Project was definitely more important, I will need to learn how to prioritize certain elements of two, maybe even three tasks at the same time.

In this project, we learned about the process of college tuition: how much it was going to cost, what the costs include, what loans there are to pay them off, how loans work, and of course, how to calculate the loans. The procedure for this experiment was to research the tuition of a college of your interest and choice, find scholarships and loan programs to pay it off, then evaluate an equation to calculate monthly payments.

The hardest part of this project was figuring out how to convert the equation. I used a monthly payment formula I found and it worked; I had an exponential equation. The harder step was to find the inverse of that, or the logarithmic form. Using some self-defined variables, I was able to simplify the equation into a clean, easier-to-manage set of numbers and then solve.

That also turned out to be a success of my project; after this simplification the numbers were incredibly easy to deal with. I was also able to show a few of my classmates how to do the same thing for their equations.

The design of my project was also a success and pain in the back. The website I used to create the infographic was too unstable and buggy, and my technology-design oriented mind really hated using it. That was a lot of stress that could have been avoided if I had used a better option. I will definitely use something else next time. But nonetheless, I think my final product does look good.

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