Inspirational MathThe purpose of this week's "Inspirational Math" was to self assess our math abilities and to identify patterns together and analyze them. The point being to, inspire us to do better in math, and not to let fear or doubt hinder us from learning. The first started out simple, with the class doing an analyzing of a pattern of dots. We all noticed the quantity of the dots in different ways; Seeing ascending stairs, counting squares, etc. Then we combined our answers and all got to see the several other ways other people saw it. The next day, we were given a worksheet that followed a certain pattern, and we were asked to isolate the pattern and predict future instances of the pattern. This was called squares to stairs, and while most were trying to brute force it, counting squares manually, myself and a few others were calculating an equation to predict all instances of the pattern. Finally, we worked on a quick cube problem. In this problem, you take a 3x3x3 cube composed of 9 1x1x1 cubes and mark every visible side, the question being, how many sides are marked thrice, twice, once, and not at all. We worked as a team to find these numbers and a possible equation to explain these, almost random amounts. And at the start of each day, we watched videos from Stanford, explaining that seemingly negative traits are actually perfectly normal or even positive things. For instance, making mistakes, evokes twice the growth that getting the problem right.
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Conclusion
Altogether, while this work wasn't at the forefront of challenges, it helped us to prepare for those challenges. This week was, in terms of preparatory math, excellent; solving these problems were easy, but expanding upon them demonstrated a greater lesson. In future math projects, I'm sure I'll use some tactics learned here to solve problems with more depth and understanding. I'll also be trying to participate more in sharing exercises, and share my ideas within groups.