Geometry Reflection...

 

In geometry class this year my class had a unit on trigonometry. The greatest growth that I have had all year was in this unit. I think that this unit is where my greatest growth happened because I learned about a number of tools that I could use to make it easier for me find missing measurements in a triangle. The purpose of this unit was to teach how to solve triangles and find their measures using the tools that we learned in class, tangent, cosine and sine and the inverses of those functions.

 

To learn how to do this we answered questions in our books and used tools on our computers to solve some questions. Then we received key problems to demonstrate that we understood the subject and how to solve the problems. After we learned the subject we created “geometry toolkits” these toolkits had formulas on them along with a few other helpful things that we were allowed to use on tests. Finally we took our chapter group quiz. This is where we get a set of difficult questions we need to answer with our other group members and the chapter test is what we are given as a final testament to our newly acquired knowledge.

 

My first artifact that I am going to be using to demonstrate my growth in this subject is the geometry sketchpad application we used. This app made it so that our class could compare triangles angles, slopes and measurements to form equations from them. The one thing that I learned and used the most throughout using the geometry sketchpad was a concept that was hard for me to understand, scaling. This app made it so I was able to look at multiple triangles and overlay them onto each other so that we could easily compare them. Then once the triangles were overlaid on each other we were able to is cos(, tan( and sin( to find missing measurements.

The second artifact that I am going to be using to demonstrate my growth is one of my key problems that we did during the unit. This showed that I could solve for missing angle inside the shape with only a little bit of information.

 

This artifact exhibits growth because in part A of it I am finding an angle that I need to find out by using my understanding of triangles and arcs in a circle. To find this angle I had to find out what the angle was. In this case angle BPC is a center angle, this means that the arc angle BC is the same as the angle BPC so angle BPC = 42 degrees. The way I knew that that angle was 42 was because we used the geometry sketchpad and I was able to understand how angles in a triangle were formed.

 

Impact of growth: The change that I saw in myself throughout this unit was how I solved for missing side lengths in figures and my understanding of equations and tools to find those missing parts out. This growth will help me in the future and present because I am using at home to make parts for my projects at home that need to be a certain shape or fit into another shape and in the future I will use it if I become an engineer.