independent research project reflection
I really liked doing my independent research project. I love projects where I can find something I want to learn about, and figure out what I want to do from there. I decided to look into cryptography because I knew most of the things we do on the internet are dependant on encryption yet I knew nothing about how it worked, and it was something steven was also interested in. The flexibility of the project allowed us to gradually change what our project would look like when we learned new information. While the project went well for us and we finished with a working product I don’t think that the exhibition went well. Though I did get to talk with steve for 20 minutes about exacty how the encryption works, there werent any other people who wanted to talk to us and the platform for the exhibition wasn’t very organised. I just wish that I had been able to set something nice up before hand and talk to lots of people. Though I can’t complain much, I got what I wanted and learned how RSA encryption works. The basic idea behind the encryption is that you have three keys, one public and two private. The private keys are yours to keep safe, they are what allows you to decrypt a message, and they multiply together to make the public key. The public key is public and can be shared with anyone, which is good because you need a the public key to encrypt a message. The “key” to keeping your information safe it that there are an infinite number of private keys that multiply together to get one public key so, you can’t work backward from the public key and figure out what they are.
Full year reflection
The only goals I set for myself in math this year were to get a good grade and to use the opportunities that the class gave me to learn more about math. Because I had already taken math three,all of the math taught in the class was familiar and pretty easy. So I wanted to take advantage of that time and challenge myself whenever possible. I know that I completed both of my goals because I have learned lots of new math this year by taking my pows and projects to a different level of understanding. In the King Arthur POW Steven figured out that if you took the number of people in the circle and wrote it out in binary then flipped the number on the front to the back you would get the answer. I explored how binary works and the mathematical answer we came up with to figure out why using the binary trick always works. Though I already knew most of the math in math three I got lots of practice with it and gained a renewed understanding. For most of the year friday math clubs seemed disorganised but, I had fun doing hard math and it helped lift a little workload off of me because I was taking calculus and math three at the same time, though there was almost never too much work between the two classes. After this year I feel prepared to move on and take math as a senior because we were prepared with good math and problem solving skills.
one of this semesters pows
POWs
I am proud of these pows mostly because I went beyond the requirements. In both of these pows did research or did calculations past the expectations, and in both pows I found much more interesting answers. For example, in pow 1 I did lots of research and so I could predict how much time we have left until there is no more farmland. Instead of finding some answer that wouldn't be relevant in my lifetime I found that we only have 50 years left!
silverton write up
semester reflection
For the most part I met all of my goals for this semester, though I didn't have many. During the semester I completed everything that I had to do and added a creative or advanced touch to all of my pows to make them more interesting.
This semester went very well I learned a lot and did well on all of my assignments. During the semester Math club was fun and worked out for the most part but due to labs and laziness we missed a lot of them.
One way I grew during this semester was as an educator. Being in a more advanced math class I have already reviewed most of the material that we are learning in class. So, when someone is stuck on a problem or doesn't understand something I can usually help. Trying to explain things greatly increased my understanding of the concepts, and usually revealed where I was wrong.
During second semester I want do lots of harder math club problems as well as make it to more math club meetings. I hope that we have lots more fun POWs, but they gotta have good stories.
This semester went very well I learned a lot and did well on all of my assignments. During the semester Math club was fun and worked out for the most part but due to labs and laziness we missed a lot of them.
One way I grew during this semester was as an educator. Being in a more advanced math class I have already reviewed most of the material that we are learning in class. So, when someone is stuck on a problem or doesn't understand something I can usually help. Trying to explain things greatly increased my understanding of the concepts, and usually revealed where I was wrong.
During second semester I want do lots of harder math club problems as well as make it to more math club meetings. I hope that we have lots more fun POWs, but they gotta have good stories.