My story described the predicament where our bakery, Crumbl 24 karat Golden Labubu, hosted a special cookie sales event. The cookie sales at different time intervals throughout the day are measured, including refunds. At the end of the day, we compare the Moonbeam Ice Cream Cookie sales from the morning and lunch periods to the afternoon and evening totals to see which time block was more successful. I am most proud of how my graph and equations, such as y = 20x – 180$ and y = 40/3x – 100, accurately represented the real-world shifts in my story, allowing me to use function values like S(6) and S(12) to reach a mathematically sound conclusion. The hardest part of creating the piecewise function was calculating the specific slopes for each unique interval and ensuring the domain and range remained consistent across the entire twelve-hour period. If I could revise one part of this project, I would follow my teacher’s feedback to more explicitly explain how events like refunds or busy periods change the steepness and direction of the lines, and I would also improve the y-axis scale to make those shifts easier to see at a glance, also identifying larger trends within my data. Ultimately, this project helped me understand that piecewise functions are efficient for modeling real-world situations, as identifying the morning rush as the steepest part of my graph allowed me to see exactly how a high rate of change translates to peak customer demand.
Throughout this unit, one of the many skills we reviewed were our skills on dribbling, passing and shooting the ball. At the start of the unit, I haven’t played football in a long time, and was quite rusty. At the end of the unit, I could successfully dribble, pass and shoot many goals, showcasing my improvement. Initially, I thought that I would only be useful in a less offensive position, but I played the position striker most frequently throughout the unit. However, something I need to work on is stopping the ball more effectively, as sometimes I accidentally send the ball flying somewhere and have to go running after it.
We prioritized water polo skillsets in the swimming unit. At the start of the unit, I could barely tread in water, but after the unit, I learned to tread in water for a prolonged amount of time also while passing and shooting the ball. An area for improvement would be improving my endurance, as I tend to get tired easily after treading in water and swimming quickly after the ball all while staying above water.
I picked this artifact as a representation of my thinking and growth since it demonstrates how I engaged in a relatively balanced discussion with my peers without my time and frequency deviating from the class average too significantly. Additionally, it also shows how I added onto different people, instead of building onto the same person’s idea all the time. This perceives me as someone who communicates effectively in the socratic seminar, as I tried my best to balance my averages with everyone without talking out of turn or talking too little.
My current goal is to consistently achieve top grades in science by developing smarter study habits and taking full responsibility for my learning. The progress I have made towards my goal is starting the study habit of reviewing newly taught concepts or topics that I still hold confusion towards.
I am most proud of deep understanding in this class. For each unit, I tend to understand concepts taught to a surface level, and demonstrate my thinking through projects adequately aswell.
My biggest challenge in this class is managing time. During the first unit, we had a meteor model project which I had chose to draw and write by hand. Underestimating the workload, I worked on it in class and only a bit at home, since I prioritized other assignments. In the time of the weekend before the project was due, I had to finalize everything within a short time frame.
I have demonstrated the qualities of an active learner by preparing effectively. I have always brought the appropriate class materials such as a charged laptop, a pencil case and all homework assigned the previous class. I would like to improve on reflecting, as I tend to disregard such processes.
This is my final sticker design, featuring an hand-drawn image of my favorite video game character, Kirby. What I really liked about this project was that we were able to create any image of our choice while incorporating elements of math into it; I prefer this performance task over practice problems any time. I wish could’ve double checked my negative dilation before turning it in, since I forgot to invert the coordinates of the figure after dilating it with a negative scale factor.
I chose question 3 as the first piece of evidence for my best thinking; at the start of the unit, I didn’t know how to describe any sequence of rigid transformations. Now, the question represents that I successfully mapped one figure onto another while explain the steps it took to get there, meaning that I understand the concept. My second piece of evidence for my best thinking is question 2. I successfully dilated the figure and explained my answer through the process of drawing projection lines, contrasting to the beginning of the unit where I didn’t know what dilating was.
Throughout this unit, I improved the most at describing and executing rigid motions. On the other hand, I believe that I still need to work on determining if triangles are congruent or not with evidence to support my claim. Some of my strengths include successfully dilating, translating and rotating figures. Three things I hope to improve on for the next unit include identifying triangle congruency, checking my work and also speeding up when solving problems.
In the next unit, I want to work on accuracy and precision when answering questions. What might get into the way of my goal is lack of motivation to practice and also time constraints, as my schedule is already busy with all my extracurriculars and homework. When I get stuck, I can possibly contact Ms. Baldwin for help and meet up in order to clear any confusion.
During the table tennis unit this year, we recalled different skills that we learned from the same unit last year, such as serving a ball and passing a ball in an orderly manner. Throughout these classes, I brushed up on my serving skills to make it harder to receive and also worked on executing strong offense hits on the opposite team’s side.
The area I would need to improve on is receiving tricky passes. The main reason I lost points to my opponent was because I failed to return attacks delivered at weird angles and different speeds, therefore I believe that improving this skill will let me improve as a table tennis player overall.
My game revolves around a bakery theme, featuring the game of plinko. The player must insert three “cookies” into the game board and tally up the total amount of points gained in the three tries.
My partners and I created a group chat in order to communicate, but some problems were bound to arise. We had conflicting schedules and sometimes could only get to each other after a period of time. I also found myself putting in more effort than my partner.
What went well was that our grand prizes were successfully taken home by the winners. On the other hand, we had some leftover prizes and our game board started sliding down the table halfway through the day.
The theoretical probability was 100%(Small), 75/2096 (Medium), 1/256(Grand). Reflecting on the outcome, we still had leftover small and medium prizes, while we should’ve bought more grand prizes.
Main Theme
- The abuse of power I explored was the Chiquita Banana Conspiracy, where the big company Chiquita, also known as United Fruit Company exploited their authority and brought harm to the civilians of Columbia.
- What I have learned from the research process was that a lot of corruption was involved in the abuse of power, such as the previous Colombian government Jacobo Arbénz getting his position revoked due to Chiquita framing him for being a communist.
The Presentation
- I practiced every night before I slept consecutively for a week in order to execute this Pecha-Kucha style presentation, sometimes also resorting to reading my notecards during lunch.
- Not only were we restricted from putting text on each slide, we were prohibited from using notecards while presenting and was also given a 5-minute time constraint. I found this challenging as I always tend to elaborate on a statement before moving on, therefore leaving little to no time to present the slides towards the end of the presentation.
Personal Growth
- My skill especially in CER writing has developed profoundly this year. I can now think critically to incorporate abundant reasoning to support my evidence, while adding additional sentences to explain how the reasoning connects back to the claim. This used to be my weak spot, always forgetting that one little step to having a fundamentally-accurate CER.
- The top 4 books I’ve read this year are Chantress, Shatter Me, Powerless, and Caraval.
- I would greatly recommend Chantress, especially to those who like fantasy. The story takes place in the medieval times, in a world where chantresses and humans reside.
- I didn’t find any books challenging.
My partner and I initially agreed on a topic that was polar opposites from the one we settled on now. We had changed topics towards the end of the research process, giving us a strict time constraint on gathering information. On the other hand, the essay writing was a breeze, and we managed to complete it in time despite previously being behind schedule. We then moved onto gathering media for the documentary, where we dug for copyright-free music and files, inserting them into the Storyboard organizer. Since the software we used only enabled one person to work on it, I edited the documentary while my partner found media for me to use. I would work on the documentary in my free time and ask my partner for her approval.
I believe that we both worked well together, as we didn’t get sidetracked by other trivial things. We did have to overcome challenges such as communicating with each other without seeing each other physically, as we were at a disadvantage due to the change in topics. Since we had conflicting schedules, we weren’t able to get back to one another right away and had to wait for some time. The work was divided somewhat equally, as my partner and I contributed equally to the script but I edited the documentary entirely by myself while my partner found media.