Hi welcome to my like terms project! In this project we explored the use of like terms and more specifically polynomials in mathematics. Unlike some of our other projects this one was a little different, we weren’t given a driving question. We got to create one! I was put in a group with Brenton and Felix and the driving question we came up with was how can we use polynomials to demonstrate the quantity and cost of materials in construction. What we decided to do was a crate a bridge with a variety of materials and then find it’s price, area, perimeter and volume. 

Now let me take you through a few of the things that we did for this project. The first main thing I want to talk about was milestone 1. For this milestone as a team me and Angelo had to make a lego creation under five dollars and calculate the price using like terms. This was a great start to the project as it really introduced the uses of like terms and polynomials could have.

Our LEGO sushi roll.

Another important part of this project was milestone 4. This was the milestone when we got to choose our groups but more importantly we got to create our driving question. Right from the start me and my group knew that we wanted to do something that involved building and creating. We thought that by doing this we could easily use polynomials as we would have real life shapes and parts to measure. We also wanted to connect our idea to the real world. Because of this we settled on making a bridge and using polynomials to measure and price it’s construction. 

Milestone 6 was our final presentation where we got to show what we had learned and created. My group made a key note where we clearly demonstrated our math and I thought we did a good job. Actually having an object like a bridge to help capture the audiences attention also helped our presentation.

Our keynote presentation.

Finally we had our test which is actually milestone 3. This test encompassed everything we had learned and really allowed me to show my extending knowledge of mathematics as I have always tested well. Although I definitely didn’t get 100% on the test I’m confident that I did very well despite never actually seeing what I got. 

We had a few competency’s for this project and I just want to talk about them for a bit. 

The first one is understanding and solving: Apply multiple strategies to solve problems in both abstract and contextualized situations. I demonstrated this competency in many parts of my project, but I think it is most visible when I had to use many different strategies and ideas to find how I could get enough polynomials and like terms into my presentation. I tried measuring many different aspects of our bridge but in the end I stuck with perimeter and area of the bridge deck, price of the parts and volume of the two pillars. 

The second competency is Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms. Once Again I demonstrated this competency in most of my project but I think the presentation best shows it. I represented mathematical ideas in numbers and equations on the keynote, but I also used objects from my bridge to represent different numbers in a symbolic way. As an example, P x 4.5, it would be the number of popsicle sticks multiplied by 4.5. 

The final competency is Connecting and Reflecting: Connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests. I think I demonstrated this competency the best as my whole project of bridge building was based around one of my areas of interest which is civil engineering, construction and design. I connected the math to this interest when get all the polynomials I needed fro the project.

In conclusion, like terms was such an interesting and motivating project. Not only did we get to come up with our own driving question, we also got to pick groups that for the most part worked really well. I definitely hit a few speed bumps like when I was trying to do the volume part of the math for my presentation, but eventually I got it. Thanks for reading my blog and I’ll see in the next one.