Week of Inspirational Math
During our first week of math class, we spent our time doing "Inspirational Math" which was basically a bunch of complicated math problems that we already had the tools to answer, we just had to figure out how to use them. We also learned about brain growth and how challenging problems expand your mind.
Energy in Motion
In the "Energy and Motion" segment, we learned about vectors and scalars and the difference between them. We also learned how to use scientific notation. This segment was part of the "Energy in Motion" physics project and we used our knowledge of vectors and scalars to calculate the forces on our mousetrap cars.
Force of Friction
In this project we learned about translating, reflecting and rotating geometrical shapes on a graph and how to calculate those changes. We also touched upon elongating and shortening shapes.
Shadows
In this project we calculated the lengths of objects by looking at their shadows, and eventually calculated how much taller our middle school could be without having it's shadow land on the elementary school's garden. We calculated all of this using simple trigonometry and by looking at the relationships between right triangles.
Pit and the Pendulum
In this project based on Edgar Allan Poe's story of the same name we learned about statistical analysis, normal distribution and standard deviation. We collected data on a variety things, from how fast our classmates could skip to how fast their hearts beat and analyzed them to create histograms, find standard deviation, find mean and find range. Eventually, we analyzed data sets regarding the periods of pendulums with different lengths and created our own equations to predict whether or not the escape shown int the story was plausible.
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Weekly Problem Sets
Every week we were given weekly problem sets, filled with math problems designed to challenge us. The hardest problems in the set were called "Challenge Problems" and solving them was the main focus of a club I am in, Math Minds. The challenge problems consistently challenged us to be critical thinkers and come up with interesting solutions to complex problems.
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