Cory Fife's Portfolio

My 11th grade year currently has been shaped by different experiences such as projects, group contributions, and overall learning new and innovating ideas that I can use in my future. One of the greatest growths that I experienced is better communicating with my fellow peers to deliver and reflect on multiple ideas to solve problems in a creative and successful manner. One project helped me reflect on my communication and figure out how my communication skills can be expanded to those who do not share a similar mindset towards a similar problem.

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The Conic Roller Coaster project, which took place in our second quarter algebra class. During the project, I had to work with another peer to construct a roller coaster out of different types of conic equations and it had to fit within a set of goals such as height requirements and having one underground section. When starting the project, my partner and I worked on sketching coasters that we thought would easy to design while being entertaining if it was realistically built. We went through several iterations before coming to the conclusion, which was named the “Big Dip”. Next was the point of the project to start designing the coaster we sketched out, but that proved difficult.

My partner and I had different expertise in conic equations and it was frustrating at times to figure out what would be next for the coaster. At some points, I had to ask the teacher to see which solution was the best. However, even when times got tough to talk to my partner, I still needed his help and he needed mine so we continued to rough it out until the end. We looked at different equations and plugged them into Demsos a graphing website, to connect the lines to best illustrate what our intended coaster to be. Even if it was not the perfect representation of what we both wanted, it came very close and I was proud of the level of communication it took between the two of us to finish this project.

Over the course of the project, I have many artifacts that tell a story of how communication fits into how it was created and finished. One of my first artifacts is the final sketch of my group’s coaster design. At the beginning of the project, my partner and I had several ideas already in motion on what the coaster would look like, but the ideas wouldn’t necessarily bounce off each other because we were both set on our ideas and hadn’t thought that the other wasn’t going to blend well. Nevertheless, we needed to communicate on what was required to be on the coaster and anything extra would need to be considered. At that point, we looked at both ideas, extracted crucial parts from each, and created the big dip as the result.

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The next artifact I would display to show communication is our equation list for the entire coaster. This was the most stressful portion of the project with plugging in the right equations, getting the requirements finished, and individually taking each equation and putting one at a time into the Word document while also trying to communicate with my partner on what equations we still needed to put in. The process to put in each equation was tedious because as we were trying to get the coaster close to our image, more equations were used to get a smoother shape. We had many equations at the end, even spanning out to more than one page.  This was where communicating help further our work and to bounce more ideas that shaped how the final product came out as.

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Going towards the ending of the project, the last artifact would be the final coaster on Desmos. This was the result of what both of us did during the entirety of the project. From the beginning, there was times where communication was heavily used to get through parts of the project that would have been dreadful if either of us were not on the right page. Doing these communication session made myself feel as if our group was well ahead the other groups mainly because of how coordinated each of us were when constructing one piece of the coaster at a time with little to no effort on discussing why a piece would not work properly. The amount of communication put into each part of the coaster made it a long way to deliver something that I can be proud of when working with another peer who I can learn from as a result.

Experiencing the level of communication that I used throughout this project helped me further prepare myself for the future by gaining knowledge on how to better communicate with others to bounce ideas off each other and revise/mold other ideas into something that even surprises yourself. I mostly learned better patience for when someone has an idea and letting them finished until they have nothing else to add to their solution. Having the opportunity to work with others gives me a proud feeling because I can work with people who come from different ideologies to solve a common issue. Participating in more projects where communication is heavily implemented to work efficiently with peers would defiantly let me gain experience to be better with people in my future work environment and allow me to work with others outside of the work field.