Jamie's Reflection

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

I believe we came together and distributed questions from different units fairly, based on what each person could handle and based on our strengths. Even though, mathematically, I may not have done the most, I think it was really challenging since I decided to take on a question that reflected my weakness in class. That questions had to do with related rates. I think this was the whole point of the project, because we sort of act as students and teachers at the same time. We were supposed to challenge ourselves and our understanding by facing these problems and learning their patterns by nothing else but practice. You can't really get to know a question really, unless you make one yourself.

I believe the fact that we were prepping for the AP exam also played a big factor on how we chose our questions. We most likely chose challenging questions of diverse topics in calculus and made questions that could possibly show up on an AP exam so that we could practice.

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

Our questions consisted of almost every possible essential unit in calculus. From related rates to integration by parts, solids of revolution, and optimization. These were some of the hardest concepts that the course provided, but we chose to do them. It's not about taking the easy way out. Practice makes perfect. How are we supposed to practice if we don't "face our fear". Because of this practice, I think it deepens our understanding for the topic and that we learned from each other on both how to do these problems elegantly and efficiently. With a lot of time invested, I believe we tried our hardest to fulfill that, and may not have mastered these types of questions completely but know enough about them to recognize their patterns.

3) Did you learn anything from this assignment? Was it educationally valuable to you?

This was our last ever DEV project and honestly I'm so happy it's finally over. We were given countless extensions and I'm quite disappointed in myself because I think I could've done way better.

I feel like the quality of my work isn't as high as I would like it to be but I suppose I'm just too hard on myself. I just feel like I could've done so MUCH more with it given the amount of time we had to finish it. Doing this DEV though forced made me force myself to explore the concepts of calculus to my breaking point.

Being in two groups was really stressful and caused a lot of problems for not only me but my other group members as well. Having to finish one DEV is hard enough let alone finishing two. The experience did teach me a thing or two that wasn't math related. I really did learn to work in cooperation with my group members and the value of responsibility. It was my sense of responsibility that made me not want to give up on all the work for my two DEV's. I didn't want to let my group members down and I should have taken into account how much responsibility this is.