Q3 Benchmark Reflection

The main that this project relates to the real world is in the facet of construction and architecture. It is important to both know the correct measurement and the correct means of attaining them in the real world. This project makes students apply essential skills and contains very marketable information that can be used for various occupations in the world. Students are challenged to come up with ways to measure unknown heights of a building using their knowledge of proportions and angles. The reason that these skills are so useful is because it teaches students how to apply themselves and possibly develop new ways and shortcuts to figure undetermined lengths or heights.

I thought that the most exciting part of the process was figuring out the proportions and their missing variables to determine the missing height of the building. It could have gone either way and it was very rewarding to see that you had gotten a reasonable or correct answer from some of your methods. The least exciting part of this project was drawing the visual representation itself. The work for it was very tedious and didn’t really show much math other than the scale. I would have much rather done another building than draw out the entire block with artistic detail.

I learned many skills from completing this project. The two mains ones that I would like to discuss are the ability to use mirrors and poles to attempt to figure out unknown heights of objects. I believe that this is not only a fun activity, but also a useful one for future assignments. It’s helpful to have a way to determine the height of a building or wall of some sort by using easy means to do so. Secondly, setting up proportions for these methods and solving them is crucial. By doing this, one can find out if angles/sides/heights/lengths are proportional or not.