The purpose of this week investigations and video-watching was to know that everyone is good at math. A lot of people can think that they are not a “math person”. Realistically, everyone can be a math person if you want to actually learn. When you are struggling you are actually learning something. It’s called brain growth. Making mistakes is part of it. Practicing math every week is to help us learn math and to know that it’s okay to struggle. When mistakes are made they are beautiful things and when you believe, amazing things happen.
All of the activities and videos we have done and seen were not really complicated. They would indeed make you think and go through steps to come up with an answer. Some things we have done were Hailstone problem, the pattern sequence, and how many squares we can fit in a bigger square. The main purpose of that problem was to see what the least amount of squares we can make in the big square. An overview of the videos was about brain growth. That was pretty much what the videos were about.
The math problem I choose to write about is the Hailstone sequence. I wanted to write about this because it was my favorite math problem. It was a problem I enjoyed doing. I learned that any number you start with will always end up ending with the number one. This problem was about creating your own data using different numbers to start with. The number would eventually end up with the number one. Any number you would choose, you would have to either multiply and add one or divide by two. These math equations would apply to either odd or even numbers. For example, I chose number 50. My last number ended with the number one, 50...1. A challenge I faced was in the beginning not getting the problem. I was a little confused on what we were doing or how to solve this problem. Now that I know how to, is really easy. A habit of mathematician would be starting small. I say this because I started out with small numbers then went bigger.
My reflection over this week of inspirational math was learning well pretty much having a review of brain growth and having a positive mind set in the class. This includes not having negative thoughts. An example is saying things like “not being smart” and “i’m not going to get the problem” etc. Being positive can also be one of a habit of mathematician I choose. My participation has been good. I make sure I do what i’m supposed to be doing.