Upper School Highlight | Mrs. Stephanie Hamblen
Our sQUADratics team, aka the Algebra 1 class at Donum Dei, completed their study of the Quadratic Function this week. This is a milestone and really a right of passage for any student of mathematics. I am so proud of the creativity and logic these students applied in developing their understanding of all the relationships between a quadratic equation, its graph, and its application in real life. This learning goal is one of the most rigorous in Algebra 1, and yet the skills that the students have gained during this time will be skills that they will be able to apply in the future.
One of our problems this week involved Daisy and Hannah launching a water balloon off of Coit Tower with the intent to have it splatter on Giulio and Phineas down below. They are so silly! Because of this, we have decided to celebrate our hard work and accomplishment by building a real life catapult that will launch a water balloon in our school yard. Believe it or not, we also used a quadratic equation to model the profit we could make if we actually went into the business of building water balloon catapults for a living. Quadratics are really quite useful :-) Pictures and videos of our catapult will be coming before the end of the session!
UPDATE: With this accomplishment under their belt, the sQUADratics team set out to celebrate by building a real life catapult that would launch a water balloon in our school yard. The students had to find the quadratic equation to model their balloon flight using data points they collected from the different launches. They got into some intense math, but we all survived. No one got hurt except for Mrs. Mammen's heart. We accidentally hit her car windshield while she was in the car...Evidence of the sQUADratics team at work are below!
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