Sam's Summary
Tyler and I chose our problems in a way to demonstrate our strong understanding of how to solve what we thought were some of the most challenging concepts we learned in your Precalc Functions course. If one can grasp the concepts we have shown then understanding other things in your course should come a lot easier. This project taught me that a lot of concepts of mathematics are very hard to teach and you must have a really have a strong understanding to explain these concepts to someone. I had to run through the problem that I made a video for almost 20 times until I came up with a good flow of how to explain the problem. I think more classes should have projects like this for students to demonstrate a full understanding of concepts learned throughout the class. The part I struggled on the most was figuring out how to upload my video because for some reason I had to try almost 4 different ways until I got it. If I go on to take AP calculus I will definitely try to think through problems as much as we were required to for this project.
Tyler's Summary
Well, I'm finally done with this project. I got to say though it was rather difficult. The largest challenge for me was figuring out a way to convert my videos into a smaller form to easier post to YouTube. That was definitely the largest problem I faced with this project. I had many other difficulties as well such as my camera shutting off from not being charged, to having no more memory, and especially when people would walk in and interrupt me while I was recording. Now for the problems, well I really tried to create difficult problems to do such as the inverse of a quadratic divided by a linear. This problem proved to be very difficult in the end. I had to do all sorts of different things we had learned in this class such as using completing the square, and even adding fractions. This problem was a real brain teaser and took me forever to figure out. Once I found out though it really clicked and had made so much sense. This type of problem is good for me and my learning experience since it took me past my regular boundaries and made me actually work to get the problem done. In the future with this problem giving me experience it can help me with problem solving for future problems I may have such as in A.P. calculus where the problems would get much harder and will require more thinking. The other problems I had also showed how I have learned and well understand the subjects of this class since I used a variety of techniques, explained what I was doing thoroughly, and used creative and complicated equations. I was able to relate a game to quadratic functions under a radical. The fact that I could spot out similarities between the real world and this class really helps show how I have come to an understanding of the concepts of this class. And finally, the fact that I was able to create such a complicated radical divided by another radical function and by showing graphs of what they would look like without the radical, and found out the domain, truly helps show that I have a clear and well educated understanding of this class and the content covered within it. Add to the fact that by going over all of these older concepts that we had first learned at the start of this trimester it really has prepared me for the final exam. I feel rather confident that I will do rather well on this exam and now thanks to this project I am happy about the outcome of the upcoming exam. So overall I feel while this project was a pain in the ***, it was beneficial to me in the end for my grade and for my final exam.