Monday, June 2, 2008

Lawrence ; The Reflection

This is my reflection on how we basically did this whole shindig.

To start off, my rundown. At first, this whole deal was gonna be a "class room" setting kinda deal. Or something a long those lines. But due to our very busy lives, we had to simplify our story and cut it into 3 episodes instead of the former 6 for each question that we basically had. Because of our limited time, and conflicting schedules, we didn't get to set out to what we basically were going to do, from our experience just filming the intro. YEAH, the introduction was that DIFFICULT to film. So we had to break 'em down. Once we started getting the flow of things, the next episodes started to fall into place a lot easier, because well, basically we knew what we were doing. Once the filming was done, we just got started. Intertwining the questions was going to be easy enough work. The math itself? Not so much.

With the math, we basically had simple questions intertwined with each other. So really, some questions had pre-questions you had to solve, before actually solving the question. In a sense, we did not make it easy on ourselves, which has it's pro's and cons, but hey, things worked out pretty fine. Just to make sure our math was correct, we ran it by Mr. Kuropatwa once, and with the help of our friend, Roxanne, she double checked it for us, and for that, we are grateful.

Inputting audio was most likely, one of the best parts of doing this project, probably because we had WAY too much fun with it. We ended up saying stuff that was WAY too funny, and WAY to ridiculous to put into the film to ever take it seriously. So, you can basically expect A LOT of bloopers and outtakes when our whole project is finish. Due to us being a three man crew, and having more that one character and since we're not professional voice actors and can make our voice into like, 6 separate characters, we were graced with the help of our good, and long time friend Eric. It was hard enough to record audio without Eric, but he just made it even harder, because he would say the most ridiculous things, and we'd have to re-record the scene ALL OVER AGAIN. But I mean really, let's get to the real reflection.

  • Why did you choose the concepts you did to create your problem set?

Why is a good question to start off with. I chose, for my questions anyway, the concepts of sine functions and identities mostly because I had the most trouble with them. I mean like, for the first test I scored a 34% basically because I didn't understand how to use solve the sine function. Identities, I faired more easily with, but in my mind, it was still like scrambled eggs, so I still had to wrap my mind around that properly. Even though it was one of my weaknesses, I feel that I have created it to become one of my strengths with this project. With the whole identities thing, it's basically the way it is, they all have different identities so, it's hard to understand the massive amount the way it could be solved. The way that Mr.K thinks makes me wonder how you can solve things more efficiently, and in different ways, even if they're created within your own mind, because he showed me that, you don't always have to do it the generic way that teachers just plop an equation on you and say "Go solve this." That unit showed me that there are multiple ways to solve equations. So basically I'm happy that I went with the concepts that I did, because now that I completely understand them, I'll be more confident in the future solving these kind of problems. It was also a great learning experience while I was creating the question, because of the different ways that you can look at it.

  • How do these problems provide an overview of your best mathematical understanding of what you have learned so far?

I always look at things in the way that, if it's the hardest thing for you to do, once you master it, it becomes one of your strengths. So because we did questions that we all had problems with understanding, it eventually made us have to pull out our best in thinking and show that we understand the question and use our best math to solve it efficiently even though we were still learning to understand it in the process. There's never a time where, I can look at something and say that's my best work, because if I'm satisfied with it, then I know I didn't do my best, because I'll always be looking for a better way to do it and solve it. So because a lot of these problems we chose were pretty hard, we had to use our knowledge of our mathematical understanding to figure it out, and learn during the solving phase. Also the fact that exams are coming up, helps me touch on things that we've done early on in the year, and refreshes my mind to be ready for that big provincial exam, in the event (like most people I presume) that we forget some of the things that we learned, since we're not constantly doing what we first learned in the semester.


  • Did you learn anything from this assignment? Was it educationally valuable to you? (Be honest with this, if you got nothing out of this assignment, then say that, but be specific about what you didn't like and offer a suggestion to improve it in the future.)

Okay, let's be honest now. I don't know if this can be properly stated as an "Assignment", especially when it's worth about 20% of our grades. I will definitely say that I've learned things from this assignment, mostly because I've had to dig back into February's notes, and experiment in the solving process of the questions that we had created. After some of the suggestions Mr. Kuropatwa made to modify the questions, we started to look at the questions in a different light. It was definitely an education eye-opener, and made me see math in a way that I've never seen it before. Also the fact that, Mr.K's been the FIRST math teacher I've ever had fun doing math with [subtract the stressing tests and the ones I failed ): ], I actually felt comfortable learning the math, especially with his innovative ways of teaching. But back on topic. Doing the project definitely served as a review and and educational help in solving these units.

I'll admit, when we started the project, I had so many ideas circulating in my mind, that I just couldn't seem to get it on paper. After seeing Justus' Halo Montage, I decided that we could do something along those lines. At first, we were gonna use the math we learned this semester to solve the ways the scientist's enhanced the "Spartans" in Halo. It seemed like a really good idea, as it involved a lot of math, but we decided to go along with a more student relating journey, and so we created a class room storyline, but we ended up not having enough time to complete such a task, so another cut was made and we had a journey of three students, under their Master JabbaMathee, go under instruction to solve math questions. It was long and difficult, but we got it done, and in amazing time at that (We did about 80% of the work in 3-4 days out of the many days we worked on it ) Not only was this a good group experience, it was also a great learning experience. This project has helped review and go over the math I failed to understand, because after all, Math is the Science of Patterns.

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