Meadows or Malls
Like most of our math units, this one was based around one central problem loosely based around a real-life situation. A town had 550 acres that they had to decide what to do with. 300 acres is old farmland, 100 acres was from an old army base and 150 acres was old mining land. The people of the city could not decide whether to use the land for recreation or for development such as stores. In a city council vote, they decided on several constraints. Our objective was to find the least expensive way to follow all of these constraints to separate the land between the two sides. When looking at how to solve this problem we started by writing out all of the constraints in a mathematical fashion. After writing out all of these constraints we started to look at how we had to use these constraints to solve the problem. After a bunch of smaller steps, we started to look at how we could use matrices. We did a lot of worksheets to get us familiar with matrices, we started by adding them, then multiplying them and finally multiplying them using calculators. We used matrices to solve the unit problem because it was basically a big equation with a bunch of variables and these are super complicated and difficult to solve if you don't use matrices. When you look at the sheet where we actually solved the unit problem you can see where we made our matrices using all of the constraints and just how difficult it would be without knowing how to use matrices. All of the papers selected for this portfolio were vital for me to be able to solve this unit problem. Working my way up solving linear systems of equations was a very necessary step for me to be able to understand and grasp solving a linear system of equations with 5 or more variable such as we had in the unit problem. When looking at the selected papers you can see this progression of moving through each of the individual steps to be able to take on that unit problem.