BUILD YOUR WALL

In Scimathics throughout the month of December, and a little bit of January, we’ve been looking at expanding and factoring algebra. To do this, we’ve used algebra tiles, which are shapes that represent the equations. For example, (x + 3)(3x + 2) would translate to 

After learning about all this, we had to create a game. This game would use algebra tiles to expand and factor different algebraic equations. We created Tower Ball. The goal of the game is to protect your tower from your opponent. We made a video explaining the rules. 

I learned a lot from this video. But instead of doing my usual reflection, we’ve been asked by our teacher to choose different curricular competencies that we worked on during this project and explain how we used them. So that’s exactly what I’m doing!

Connect mathematical concepts with each other, other areas, and personal interests.

For this project, and most projects, it makes it more interesting when you add your personal interests. When you do this, it pushes you to do better. For this project, I made the game have a medival theme. The tower is based off of a tower that I used to drive past often. I feel as though this theme really added to the game, and made it more fun to play!

Think creatively and with curiosity and wonder when exploring problems.

When given the task of creating a game that uses algebra tiles to expand and factor algebraic equations, a lot of us had to really think of what to do. It was hard to come up with an idea, let alone one that would be fun. Me and my partner Tamara looked down several pathways, trying to find a viable idea. Then finally, after many ideas, we came up with tower ball. It would be fun, as including not only math, but also construction and destruction. What more could you want?

Visualize to explore and illustrate mathematical concepts and relationships.

Algebra tiles played a huge part in this project, and their main purpose is to help people visualize algebraic equations, in an actual, physical form. Using the algebra tiles while learning about these concepts was hugely beneficial. When I had these physical things, it really helped me fully comprehend what we were learning. In the video, I think we demonstrate this well. We show how a number, the values on the cards, can be used to solve these equations.

Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms.

Again, this was mostly shown by the algebra tiles. These small pieces of plastic, or in the case of our video, abstract shapes, give physical form to mythical numbers. It demonstrates the intricacies of algebra, while being simple enough that a 5 year old could use them. The tiles show how the math works as well. You can see what’s multiplied together, and come to understand this complicated medium.

Week 9 of the Student Blogging Challenge

This week’s Student Blogging Challenge was all about coding. Now, I didn’t know much about code other than the stuff we did on Swift Playgrounds in Grade 8. This was super fun, so I did all the challenges!

The First Challenge was about posting a comment for Alex. Alex is a coder who works for Incsub. He is visually impaired, and works with having sites readable for visually impaired individuals. I think it’s really cool how he hasn’t let anything get in his way of achieving his goal. This was my comment.

Fingers crossed for a response! I’ll update this if I get one.

The next thingamajig I did was the Hour of Code activity. In this, we pretty much went on this website and did a coding activity. I decided to do the flappy birds one, because I thought it looked cool.

This one was pretty easy to understand, easy enough that I got it right away. You had to have commands and stuff. It was pretty cool.

In the end, I got to code my own Flappy Birds game! Try it out!

I also got a certificate, which was pretty awsome.

The final task was to do some HTML coding. So, I decided to manually make links for this post!

Usually, I would just select the text, press link, and put in the URL. What I did this time was more time consuming, but was a lot more fun. I used the cheat sheet from the SBC challenge to help me out.

Yup, it was very time consuming. But now, if something ever happens to thiw website, I’ll know what to do. Until then, I think I’m gonna stick with the link button!

Santa Goes Skydiving!

It’s beginning to look a lot like the holidays! It is soon the time for Christmas, Hanukkah and many others. My mom’s favourite holiday is solstice, on December 21st, but we still celebrate Christmas. For this week’s challenge, I decided to find a holiday game and write a review for it. The first game was Santa Map Dive on Google Santa Tracker!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This was a really fun game. The objective was clear, and it was very holiday based. It was cool having control of Santa, who resides over this holiday. What was really annoying was that the controls weren’t great, so moving Santa was extremely difficult. My friend tried it and Santa ended up spinning in a circle. Great game though. Good for older kids. Try it an tell me in the comments what you thought of it!