Now that it's all over and done....

OMG!!! It's finally done! Haah! Mission Accomplished!!!!

Man, am I ever happy. I personally think that we did awesome on this project. Our project is in the form of a videos series. Each episode has a slideshare presentation inbetween with fully explained solutions. We decided to do our presentation this way because we felt that having an exciting storyline with appropriate questions would attract people. In a way, it's like they are Agent Double Oh 3.14 (and that's quite a clever name don't you think? Props to Mary and Dion for that one!)

I think our problems were pretty diverse and they were helped our storyline flow. The actual videos are quite funny I think, but then again, who am I to put words into your mouths? After hours and hours of working on this project, there's only one thing I can say now. I'M SO GLAD IT'S OVER AND CAN'T WAIT TO DO IT AGAIN NEXT YEAR!!! LOL. Yea that's right. I said it. I can't wait. Now let's move on to the more important parts of this reflection.

• Why did you choose the concepts you did to create your problem set?

Well this one is easy. We basically tried to pick the problems in each unit that we had some trouble on and we combined them in a way that would make sense in our storyline. We had many different problems queued up but in the end, we trashed a few of them because they just didn't fit in.

One of the most important things that we kept in our heads was that we wanted to make questions that were hard enough to pose a challenge and make you think but easy enough so that when you see the question people don't go "This looks waaaaaay too complicated!" and they end up just looking at the answer and moving on. If we made the questions too hard, people might not really absorb anything because they would do just that : look at the answer and move on. Especially with our project having a storyline, it was really important to keep that balance between question difficulty and storyline interesting-ness. On the other hand, if we made the questions too easy, people would lose interest fast and what we made would just be a short 1-minute per question review. Maintaining a good balance was definitely quite difficult and stress inducing.

We also chose these questions because we thought it they would provide a diverse enough set of questions that a great deal of questions would be answered. We knew it wouldn't be possible to answer every single question out there about math in one project. I think that's the reason we all have to do one. It's so that as many questions, comments, complaints, concerns, anxieties, inquiries and uncertainties any person might have get answered or touched upon. I think that as we've worked through this, I have seen and fully understood the true meaning of this project.

• How do these problems provide an overview of your best mathematical understanding of what you have learned so far?

These problems show that when we all work hard together, we can tackle any math problem that comes our way. We started all these questions from scratch and tweaked them around so that the numbers worked. And if they didn't, well then we just picked new numbers or even changed the question entirely just so it does! Also by picking and fully explaining a wide variety of questions, it shows how much we know about the subject. It's just as Mr.K quoted, "You can't say you've learned something until you've taught it to someone else and they can do it." Hopefully the way we have explained it is sufficient enough for people to understand and really know what they are reading. That was really my main goal as the annotator.

• Did you learn anything from this assignment? Was it educationally valuable to you? (Be honest with this. If you got nothing out of this assignment then say that, but be specific about what you didn't like and offer a suggestion to improve it in the future.)

I learned a lot from this assignment. I learned how to create my own questions, answer and annotate them all from scratch. I've helped plenty of people before and explained my answer to them and how I got it but never like this. This was definitely a challenge for me and it helped me to dig deeper into my abilities in math to be able to explain it digitally in a way that is still as effective as me verbally explaining it to someone. I also learned how to use various digital tools for presentations. I got to learn how to use Prezi which I have already used before in English and History class. However, I had to find a new media to use for Math. As I was trying out new tools, I got a chacne to learn how they work. In the end, I decided that slideshare would be the best.

As for educational value, yes it was valuable to me. While I was going through the questions and having Mary and Dion edit them for me, I got to see the little mistakes that I made. One of the most obvious ones was from the first question with the hyperbola. I kept drawing the hyperbola opening in the wrong direction. I never would have caught that if Mary hadn't pointed that out. Thanks so much Mary. I think that these DEV presentations are educationally valueable to many of us because it gives us a chance to see the little mistakes we make. It also gives us a chance to learn from others and to obtain solutions to our questions. All in all, I think this project is more educationally valueable than any other project I've done because what we have created is able to be viewed by everyone around the world. It's not just limited to those in our classroom. Instead of having only 20 or so people helping you out, you now have a whole world of tutors. Sure you won't be able to ask for their help 24/7 but it's great to know that there's always someone there to answer your questions.

In conclusion, I would just like to say that I could not have wished to be in a better group. Mary, Dion and I worked superb together and the project came together beautifully. Thanks so much to everyone who helped us out. Props to Dion for the fantastic editing job and to Mary for the great acting job. (: You two made this project a lot less painful and a lot more fun! Thank you Mr. K for giving us this opportunity. We may have never even thought about doing this if it weren't for you.Thanks also to our Pre-Cal 40S Winter '09 class for making this an awesome year! I seriously can't wait until next year so that we can........well we'll just let you guys find out next year. I hope you guys has plenty of fun reading about what we had to say about this project and I especially hope you enjoyed following the adventures of Agnet Double Oh 3.14!

Here's to a finished DEV!

KANPAI!!! lol. xD

~jayp~
A.K.A. Dr. Clang Chang Ping xD