Hi guys! Today’s post is all about a project that I did for math. In class we are learning about Polynomials. We were given the task to apply our knowledge of Polynomials to make our project. This times project was a really interesting one to do because of how much freedom we got. We chose our own driving question, our own solution, and our own way of presenting it. As long as it used Polynomials and showed our understanding of what Polynomials are.

With freedom comes great responsibility. Luckily we were allowed to partner up and I made a group with my friend Grace. Grace and I had a lot of ideas at first such as building a map of an amusement park, or a model of some sort. In the end we decided to make an object that can change shape to show a physical model of diagrams from the textbook. Then, once we had our idea we created our driving question which ended up being; how can we use a 3D object that changes shape to teach others about polynomials? We made our object out of cardboard and magnet to make our box easily rearrangeable. 

For this project I was using skills like applying and innovating. This project was very open ended so being able to use skills like applying and innovating is key. I found that we had trouble with the innovating part because of how we wanted to make our object rearrangeable. Coming up with solutions for this wasn’t too hard but executing the so,union became a problem. Some problems that we encountered was budget, and time. We first tried to use string to connect the pieces but we found that it was hard to work with a the final product was stiff and closer to a fixed object. I’m sure there are ways we could have overcome this but we decided that we didn’t want to pursue it so we changed tactics. Instead we used joints that could be glued onto cardboard. This worked a lot better and made it a lot easier to rearrange. If I had more time I would want to hide the joints more by maybe adding another layer of cardboard on top. Other than that, I am satisfied with how it turned out.

The applying part of this project would have to be how I used my knowledge of polynomials to what I made. I understand the concept of polynomials well so being able to apply that knowledge didn’t seem like a big deal. In the end our object can show polynomials in 2 ways. The first was is using perimeter and area problems. The models can be arranged to represent different shapes.

The second way is similar to the first, but instead each shape is 2D and represents a representation:

This project gave me a deeper insight to how polynomials work and also how, in a way, teaching works. Finding different solution to a problem was really fun but I also had to consider my audience to understand how they might interpret the object.