Roxanne's Reflection

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

I chose to create problems based on what I had the most trouble with mainly because it would help me fully understand how to solve these certain problems. The first problem in chapter one, which was in the circular functions unit would probably be one of the most challenging problems to solve. Because it involved a lot of work to know how to graph and plot the information given to you. Although the trigonometric identity unit was pretty straight forward, I still had trouble on this unit because there could be so many ways to find the answer, which got me confused at times. I’m sure others had trouble on this unit because in order to get good at solving these questions you need a lot of practice. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 are mainly about logarithms and exponents, which in my opinion was one of the tough units. The only difficulty I had with this unit was the graphing and the word problems because those two main areas have always been my weaknesses in math. The other units included in the project, which are transformations, and the conics unit was pretty straight forward and easy to grasp at times. Though, it both had a lot of graphing, I thought it’d be a good idea to include it the project to help others how to solve them.

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

I found that these problems helped me understand what I needed to look over, especially since exams are coming up. I knew these questions would be difficult to solve but with the help of actually taking the time to look over what I had trouble and such, it made it easier to solve the questions. I thought that actually teaching all of the problems and explaining how to solve them, shows how much I understood each unit. Basically what I’m saying is that, if you know something by heart, you can easily teach it to other people.

• 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.)

Since we’re being honest here, I’d like to say that when we were first given this assignment, I really didn’t like it. This assignment never got me interested in the beginning because I’m not very good in math compared to other students. Therefore I thought it’d be very difficult and not fun at all. I’m not going to lie, in the beginning of the project I was frustrated and confused on what we had to do because I had no idea where to start. But when I actually took the time to make up questions along with Francis, it wasn’t so bad. It takes hard work to create a really good project and both Francis and I took that time to make it as well as we possibly could.

All in all, I learned a lot from this experience because it taught me how to teach other people how to solve different math problems. I’ve always had difficulties in explaining the steps I took to find my answer but since this project included a lot of explaining and describing, it taught me a lot. This project also helped me look over old notes and problems to prepare myself for the exam. If this project wasn’t given, I probably wouldn’t go too far in my notes to review things I forgot in this semester. Overall, I thought this project was a really good experience to help me; and hopefully my group members, in understanding math much better.