Jayde on Sept 21

September 21, 2006

First of all I would like to congratulate Mr. Max on his the baby boy

Today in class we mostly worked with spreadsheets. Mr. Max made up a question using a flat piece of paper as a diagram. The goal was to try to find the length and with of a rectangular prism with the greatest volume. Although not all of the computers were working we took notes off of the smartboard. It was kind of hard to take notes because most of the stuff was just observing and discussing.
In the example we started of with the basic dimensions of a piece or regular paper 8.5” X 11” but had to convert it to cm, which then became 21.6 cm X 27.9 cm
Mr. Max then cut a “1 cm” square on each side of our rectangular prism and then continued in this pattern showing a noticeable difference in the volume increase.
We figured this problem out three different ways, the first way was by using excel; which was very useful but we figured if we want to go into the third decimal place it gets time consuming. Using excel we also found out a few different ways of putting in the equations (My way and Mr. Max’s way) both we’re right (although mine was still easier). The first way was a simple equation but may not work if you change the amount of the height of our prism. The other way was more of a complexed equation that you in which you had to look down the “B” column but it worked even when we changed the width.
The second way we did it was on our calculators. We first had to make an algebraic equation:
Volume = (length) (height) (width)
=(27.9-2X) (21.6-2X) (X)

We put this equation in our calculator in our “y=” function and graphed it. We adjusted our window settings, and then traced out our cubic function to find our greatest volume. To check this we then used our cubic function button. (This was done at the end of class we didn’t quite finish)

The third way was by creating a chart:
Height
Length
Width
Volume (cm^3)
1
25.9
19.6
507.64
2
23.9
17.6
841.28
3
21.9
15.6
1024.92
4
19.9
13.6
1082.56

We ended class with an assignment:
Exercise Two: Questions #2, #3
Tomorrows Scribe will be Aimee