Over the last few months in scimatics, we have been learning about the Pythagorean theorem which is a type of theorem used to measure angles
At the start of this project, I was quite confused because I honestly didn’t know pretty much anything about the topic
(here is a photo of a mind map I did at the start of the project)

after I wrote down all my questions and everything I thought I knew we started going through some textbooks and doing some worksheets to further understand the project. One thing I should mention is that you might see me talk about lasers on the mind map that’s because we were told at the very start of the project that we were going to make a laser display using mirrors and math to make a shape with one laser. Now back to the work part of this project during some of the textbooks I was a little bit confused because it might seem pretty simple and I mean your right it does seem simple but I learned that it was confusing at least for me but after a little bit of time I figured out pretty much everything. one of the more complicated parts of this project is when we got to try out a website where you can make a laser display simulation it even has more things that we used in the final part of the project like circular mirrors, light beams glass tools a quite a bit more. If you want to check the website here’s the link
The reason we were trying this website out is that it was first of all good practice to use what we learned and because it lets us measure the angles and then use them for an example to use to make our display work better. At this point in the project, I got covid so I had to take a week off of school and this was right after winter break ended so I did not have school for three weeks straight. After I got back and started going back to school again I forgot a few things and my group had started making our display lucky for me it was just some writing/ math on a piece of cardboard so I got to help paint it black and I mostly worked on putting up the mirrors to follow the path we made. and it often the mirrors would move or the laser but I wanted to be able to move the mirrors so that I could fix them if the math was wrong. A fun part of making the display is that we got to give it a theme or make it look however we want we made it plain black so that during the display the laser would be the centrepiece and not the surroundings we also gave our display walls so that the laser would not go to a wall or in someone’s eye. After the process of glueing and painting even going over our math with a white marker we finished and got to present in a gallery walk.
(If you don’t know what a gallery walk is it’s where you go look around at other people’s work.)
here is my project image during the gallery walk.

(The laser is a bit off because I angled the mirrors wrong)

the finale
I really enjoyed this project because we got to play and do work with lasers which is cool for a school project and I feel like I learned a lot from this project as while after all of the work during this project, I feel like I can confidently say that I understand and feel like I can use the Pythagorean theorem. Also, I think I could answer my questions from my mind map from the start of the project.

curricular competencies

Questioning and predicting:
for the whole project, I didn’t get distracted or very off task a example of this is the quality and how I work because I think I did quite a good job.

communicating and representing:
I did a good job representing my work even if I was a bit off sometimes a example of this is the final project in the photo earlier it was a bit off because we had the mirrors angled wrong after I moved them it was a lot better but the math I did earlier was quite good as well.

Applying and innovating:
everyone in my group helped a lot during the project and our laser triangle was quite accurate and planned well.