Applying Geometry to Vehicle and Rollercoaster Design...

The last two classes have gone fairly well, and Ms. Tran and her class seem to be accepting my weekly presence and my discussions. Last week I was feeling ambitious, and I prepared a talk centered around convex sets, which Ms. Tran had introduced the previous week. I wanted to introduce to them the concept of design optimization, and finding the minimum of a curve. I used an example from my previous talk about car safety, which I think was a good transition from the week before. This talk was very high-level, and we discussed design spaces. To show its usefulness, I brought up the idea of multiple variables and dimensions, and brought up the fact that we cannot visualize curves in more than three dimensions. This all circled around to drive home my point about the usefulness of having convex sets.

I knew coming into this that it wouldn't be easy to explain, and I think the first class got a bit lost during my talk (it didn't help that they had an assignment to work on during the talk). As I got more comfortable with presenting it and learned from the first class, I think the second and third classes were more able to follow what I was saying. For the fifth-hour class, the non-accelerated geometry class, I chose not to give the same talk, since it wasn't relevant to their work and we didn't think they would be interested. I decided instead to talk to them about triangles and trusses, and I brought in some very crude 3-D models of a square and a triangle, showing the strength of the triangle over the weakness of a square in a structure. I didn't prepare as much for this talk, and without the visual structure of a powerpoint presentation, I don't think they took it as seriously. This did not go as well as I had hoped.

Today I came in with an improved version of my fifth hour talk from last week, to be given to all of the classes. I set up a powerpoint presentation that talked about rollercoasters, picking out one in particular from Cedar Point. We discussed reasons for designing rollercoasters, safety factors and concerns, and the truss structure of the rollercoaster. I then used the 3-D models to show the importance of triangles in a stable design, and I explained how useful it is to know when triangles and angles are congruent. This was pretty successful in the accelerated classes. They asked a lot of relevant questions and seemed to have some genuine interest in the topic.

Today's fifth hour class was very hard to handle. The school was doing "hall sweeps", which means the teachers were locking their doors after the bell rang, leaving late students in the halls to be collected and disciplined. Fifth hour was at about half capacity, with only 7 students. The students that were locked out were being very disruptive (banging on the door and yelling through the window), and it was tough for me to get through that. I don't think more than one or two of the students actually followed my discussion all the way through, which was disappointing and disheartening. I try very hard to make these interesting and relevant, but I need to find another way to get through to this class. I will try harder in the future, and hope that these external distractions will calm down.