Cake Terms?! | A Scimatics Project
Hallo and welcome to another blog post. Today, I am proud to announce that I have come up with a pretty good introduction to do, every single blog post, I will be greeting you in a different language, this time, it’s German, and the other, well 50 ish times were in English. Now, in this blog post I am going to be discussing a new project that we had just completed in Scimatics called “Like Terms”. In this project, we learned about polynomials, collecting like terms, etc.
For our final presentation, we got to choose anything that we wanted to do that involved us collecting like terms: a cookie (with the ingredients), music (with different notes and instruments), a bridge (with the materials), etc. Also, in this project, we got to choose our own driving question based on what we decided to do for our final presentation. My group’s driving question (Kaia, Julia and I) was “How can polynomials represent the quantity of each ingredient in a cake?”. Because, what we decided to do was make a cake that looked like an iPad (just to make it more PLP themed).
Understanding and Solving – Apply multiple strategies to solve problems in both abstract and contextualized situations.
In this case, it’s combining the like terms (in our cake/project) and demonstrating it. In our final presentation, we did show our original polynomials and it after collecting the like terms but, because we had so many different ingredients in our solution (which is how we used like terms, the amount of cups used with each ingredient), even after collecting the like terms, it was still pretty long.
Communicating and Representing – Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms.
In this case, it was based on the quality of our presentation: practiced, clear, detailed, etc. And of us using the correct usage of vocabulary: term, coefficient, exponent, degree. We did prepare a pretty good quality presentation and did use the correct vocabulary, but I think that we could’ve used more of that vocabulary in our presentation, not to mention maybe trying to use coefficients or exponents to simplify our final like terms.
Connecting and Reflecting: Connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests.
In terms of our project, this just means having personalized and original work done in our project. Other than having a little inspiration for the cake and using recipes to make the different parts of the cake, everything was original and personalized to us; the iPad apps/apple pencil were our little touches to make them more “PLP”. For our presentation, I think that we could’ve made the keynote a little more artistic and eye appealing, personalized to us, but that is all I’d really change based on it being original and personalized.
Applying and innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches.
For this project, this competency just really means that we have used all of our class time very efficiently for our project work and extra learning. Every single class, we made sure that we got all of the work we had to get done, fast and productively. On the other hand, because we couldn’t make the cake in class, we worked on our polynomials/like terms, keynote, practicing the keynote and finding good and as simple as possible recipes.
Click here to see my presentation:
Scimatics Presentation | Like Terms
To conclude, I had lots of fun with this project because I got to work with some classmates/friends that had good skills that helped with this project (i.e. Julia has lots of experience with cooking/baking and Kaia is very artistically minded and creative). Not to mention, I also learned how to use/make fondant because I am very inexperienced in cooking and baking. I also loved the concept of the project: having more freedom and options of what to do yet still using maths techniques to simplify the making of it (because math is important for lots of aspects in life).
See you in my next blog post!