Escape Room Reflection
Escape Room Project Reflection
By Carter McQuinn
I participated in the 10th grade geometry class portion of the Escape Room. I learned math in this project while working on construction and a little bit in puzzle building. However, I do not think that it was an adequate amount of geometry skills to have learned this semester. I learned some equations on building picture frames and mattes for the art pieces. I think that I learned some very interesting things about biology that will help me in that class next year but I feel that this project was very much more focused on biology than it was in geometry. This made it a little bit hard to participate in puzzle building because most of the biology material I have not learned yet. When I first heard about this project I was very excited and thought that I would learn a lot in the process of doing this project. We went to the New Mexico Escape room and this really inspired me for how great we could make this project if we put the effort into it. While this was a really good project, I am concerned that I did not learn very much geometry in the process.
I think that I grew in the HOHAM in a big way in multiple areas. For one I grew in my perspective. While working on the escape room I started doing something that I have not really done before. We wouldn't just come up with an idea as a class and from there just try to figure out different ways that we could make that puzzle or that theme work into our escape room. Instead I began just using a different perspective and not just following one idea. I would think about whole new ways that this project could be done. Even if I did not know where this idea was going, I expanded my thoughts instead of just staying with my one perspective on the idea. Another thing that I learned was perseverance. Somewhat related to the perspective I made a big effort to keep working when things got confusing and to look from different angles and persevere through our problematic situations to get things done. For example, the same day that the exhibition was starting the fire marshal came to school and made us take down the fake walls that we had put up for the escape room. When this happened I know a lot of people who wanted to give up or just do the art room part of the project. I had this in my head for a bit but I knew that we couldn't give up, we had put so much effort into it already. So, instead of giving up, our class persevered and came up with new ideas. We could replace these walls and not let this stop the amazing work that we did. A place that I grew in the 21st century skills was with collaboration. We had a very large group of people working on this project and at first I did not like this. It was hard for me because with this many people I did not feel that my help was needed and was never sure what to do. Although after the first week of the construction I started to feel better, I began to get to know the sophomores that I was working with and tried to help with what I could. I really liked this because I started to feel like I actually had a purpose in building the escape room.
During the play testing I never actually ran the room by myself. I spent a lot of time with other students running the room and helping with hints and timing. I really liked this because I could see all the things that were happening both in the Escape Room and in the Control Room. I could see the people running the room helping each other to come up with fun clues and hints and having fun while sharing the work. I could listen to the people in the room and help out too.
In this project I believe that I improved as a person by generally being a calmer more focused student. In the beginning, every small mess up would frustrate me and I would not know how to take action. When people made a mistake, I was unsure of how to deal with it. During this project I made a lot of mistakes too. Working with a huge group of people in a small room really helped me accept that mistakes happen and everything can be resolved. I realized that if we all focus and atttempt to solve the problem, there is no reason to get frustrated. I learned that one person with a bad attitude can slow everything down.
This project was very interesting to me because to me it seemed like my first real project based learning class. This project was more than just a doing research, building a small project and writing an essay about it. The Escape Room Project was a big interesting project that took a lot of time and effort. While working on this project, everything I learned was either put into the project or very useful things to know. Overall for this project the skills that I learned are things that I think I will hold onto and the fact that the project was a very cool idea helped a lot to the meaning of all the studying and working on the escape room.
By Carter McQuinn
I participated in the 10th grade geometry class portion of the Escape Room. I learned math in this project while working on construction and a little bit in puzzle building. However, I do not think that it was an adequate amount of geometry skills to have learned this semester. I learned some equations on building picture frames and mattes for the art pieces. I think that I learned some very interesting things about biology that will help me in that class next year but I feel that this project was very much more focused on biology than it was in geometry. This made it a little bit hard to participate in puzzle building because most of the biology material I have not learned yet. When I first heard about this project I was very excited and thought that I would learn a lot in the process of doing this project. We went to the New Mexico Escape room and this really inspired me for how great we could make this project if we put the effort into it. While this was a really good project, I am concerned that I did not learn very much geometry in the process.
I think that I grew in the HOHAM in a big way in multiple areas. For one I grew in my perspective. While working on the escape room I started doing something that I have not really done before. We wouldn't just come up with an idea as a class and from there just try to figure out different ways that we could make that puzzle or that theme work into our escape room. Instead I began just using a different perspective and not just following one idea. I would think about whole new ways that this project could be done. Even if I did not know where this idea was going, I expanded my thoughts instead of just staying with my one perspective on the idea. Another thing that I learned was perseverance. Somewhat related to the perspective I made a big effort to keep working when things got confusing and to look from different angles and persevere through our problematic situations to get things done. For example, the same day that the exhibition was starting the fire marshal came to school and made us take down the fake walls that we had put up for the escape room. When this happened I know a lot of people who wanted to give up or just do the art room part of the project. I had this in my head for a bit but I knew that we couldn't give up, we had put so much effort into it already. So, instead of giving up, our class persevered and came up with new ideas. We could replace these walls and not let this stop the amazing work that we did. A place that I grew in the 21st century skills was with collaboration. We had a very large group of people working on this project and at first I did not like this. It was hard for me because with this many people I did not feel that my help was needed and was never sure what to do. Although after the first week of the construction I started to feel better, I began to get to know the sophomores that I was working with and tried to help with what I could. I really liked this because I started to feel like I actually had a purpose in building the escape room.
During the play testing I never actually ran the room by myself. I spent a lot of time with other students running the room and helping with hints and timing. I really liked this because I could see all the things that were happening both in the Escape Room and in the Control Room. I could see the people running the room helping each other to come up with fun clues and hints and having fun while sharing the work. I could listen to the people in the room and help out too.
In this project I believe that I improved as a person by generally being a calmer more focused student. In the beginning, every small mess up would frustrate me and I would not know how to take action. When people made a mistake, I was unsure of how to deal with it. During this project I made a lot of mistakes too. Working with a huge group of people in a small room really helped me accept that mistakes happen and everything can be resolved. I realized that if we all focus and atttempt to solve the problem, there is no reason to get frustrated. I learned that one person with a bad attitude can slow everything down.
This project was very interesting to me because to me it seemed like my first real project based learning class. This project was more than just a doing research, building a small project and writing an essay about it. The Escape Room Project was a big interesting project that took a lot of time and effort. While working on this project, everything I learned was either put into the project or very useful things to know. Overall for this project the skills that I learned are things that I think I will hold onto and the fact that the project was a very cool idea helped a lot to the meaning of all the studying and working on the escape room.
Geometry POL Prep - Semester 1 Reflection
Geometry Skills
Mastering POWs
1. The topic that I feel that I have mastered most is writing up POW's. At the begining of the year the first two pows I did a terrible job scoring a 60% on POW 1. The main reason for my terrible job was I did not know how to do the writeup. On POW 2 I scored a 70% for at that time I had still not mastered writing up the POW. As I did more POW's I learned it was not very difficult to write it up as long as I put some effort into fully understanding the problem.
First of all, I did not answer all four questions. My answers are short and vague. The overall writeup was also very short and was not fully thought through. On number 2, I fully answered the problem and got full points, but by not answering 1 and 4 my final score was very low.
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In this POW I completed all four questions however my answers were very short with no real explanation about my work. On number 1 I did not explain the actual steps that showed how I understood the information provided in order to solve the problem.
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By POW 3 I have greatly improved my writeup skills. On this POW I did not know exactly how to solve this problem and find the answer. I explained how I solved the length of all sides but one and explained why I could not find the length of that side. Although I did not answer the problem my writeup skills had improved so that I still scored 100%.
Explorations
2. The explorations helped me very much. Some explorations were completed at home and then in class we would discuss the answers. This helped me very much because I could not only see the correct answer but I could see if other students had struggled with the same problems. Other explorations would be done in class in small groups. I liked this even more because we were able to help each other using our individual strengths.
3. A breakthrough that I have had this semester with my geometry class is when I realized that I can use the pythagorean theorem on many more problems than I first thought. After doing a lot of work in class with triangles I realized that the pythagorean theorem is a very useful tool. What empowered me in moving forward is realizing that throughout this year I have started building a mathematical toolbox. I am slowly filling this mental toolbox with theorems, formulas, methods and strategies. Looking back on the work that I completed at the start of the semester I can see that I have now learned how, when and where I can use these tools.
Problem Solving Skills
Habits of a Mathematician: Generating Ideas
The one habit of a mathematician that I feel I have the most mastery over is Generating Ideas. When I come upon a problem that I do not understand I don't simply think "I don't know what to do" and give up. In order to generate ideas I start by labeling all known values, drawing a sketch of the problem and considering needed missing information. At this point I generate ideas on how to find the missing information. Generating ideas comes from my toolbox of theorems, formulas, methods and strategies.
POW 7: I had no idea how to put these cards in order. By generating ideas I started to think about it will turn out by placing this card on top of this one. Each idea I generated, not all of which were good led me to a new idea which finally resulted in understanding how to place the cards.
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9/29 Exploration: In this exploration I generated ideas using my mathematical toolbox to solve all these problems. The idea that I used the most was drawing out all the problems. By drawing out all these problems to scale and then labeling all known values I was able to solve all the problems correctly.
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Habits of a Mathematician: Reflecting and Synthesizing
I think that the habit of a mathematician that I have the most room to stretch with is Reflecting and synthesizing. Although I am good at connecting my answers to real world examples, most of the time I have difficulty justifying and describing how I arrived at my answer. My other issue regarding this habit is that I will answer a problem correctly and move on without taking the time to contextualize and reflect on it. What i think has held me back from improving in this skill this semester is impatience. In general, math is one of my strengths and instead of taking the little steps through a problem, I often do the small steps mentally not writing them down and then forgetting how I arrived at my answer making it difficult to justify.