We are Group Two, consisting of Amalina, Adabel Tan, Grayce Yeo and Eunice Huang.
We woke up at 6am to get ready and make our breakfast for the day, which was sausages and omelettes. The night before, we bought gifts for our mentors during the Challenge. However, when we left the room, we almost forgot about the gifts, so we had to make the others wait for us while we go back up to the room to get them.
Compared to yesterday, we felt less awkward and we could share our opinions more openly. Hence we feel that we worked quite well and efficiently with our groups and had a really enjoyable time preparing for our final presentation. During the preparation for the presentation, we had to use softwares like Delftship (virtually builds models of ships) and Loggerpro (creates graph or tables which involves at least two factors). Most of us used Loggerpro as we had some experience with using it during the first three days at A.B. Paterson College. However, majority of us did not use Delftship as it involves complicated diagrams. Even though the teachers showed us a tutorial video for the software, nothing much was taught and hence we had no idea how to use it, and had to experiment on our own.
After sharing our ideas on how we want the boat to be like, we moulded out the plasticine onto a wooden block to form the shape of the boat. We then brought the model to the vacuum machine to melt a piece of plastic over our mould. This forms our boat! After that, we had to test out our boat with weights which acted as a ballast in the trough.
Since some of our boats did not manage to reach our expectations, we had to brainstorm possible solutions to improve our design. All in all, we made at least two prototypes per group. Thankfully, our final prototype was successful and we could start collecting our data and putting it together for our presentation.
Personally, our group feels that through the presentation, we were able to understand better what we had been doing. Therefore we felt that the activity was beneficial to us as well as the aim of this trip.
Although it was our first year taking part in this Mathematical Modelling Challenge, Sarah’s challenge group managed to achieve first in their class. It was a proud moment for us Cedarians as well as the teachers because she won herself a highly advanced graphic calculator.
After the prize presentation, we boarded the bus and headed off to Marina Mirage for our cruise cum dinner. We feel that the dinner was pretty challenging as we had to rush for the food because everyone was very hungry and it ran out very quickly. The food hardly travelled away from the counter because everyone was walking towards it instead of waiting for the waitresses to serve them.
In the cruise ship, we managed to view the night city lights and admire the ripples in the water. The wind was soothing and refreshing. We interacted with the students from other schools and took pictures with them. While waiting for the food to be ready, we drank a variety of soft drinks
At the end of the cruise, we had to part with the students from the other schools. Since it was the last time we would see them and we had strong emotional bonds, we felt really somber and took our last pictures with them. Some of us even exchanged contacts so as to cherish the memories together.
Over these five days, we have learnt that Mathematics can be applied any and everywhere in our daily lives. Travelling in a car already has so many aspects that involve Mathematics such as, prediction of our petrol consumption, price of it, and even the time taken to travel from one place to another.
 |
| Eunice's group |
 |
| Amalina's group |
 |
| Grayce's and Adabel's group |
No comments:
Post a Comment