Sometimes in life you have to make estimations. I have always been one to want precise answers but the truth is you are not always going to be able to get the precise results that you want. In reality, it’s just not a realistic goal. Many times you will have to make assumptions and estimations in order to obtain any results close to the actual results. This class has put me in situations that have tested my ability to make estimates and assumptions in order to make calculations. I will provide three example of assignments that test this acquired knowledge of mine.
The first example is the assignment “team demographics.” The purpose of this assignment was to create a target audience for our serious game. We wanted our target audience to be people who cared about world problems and had an interest in disaster preparedness. However, there is no statistics that provide us with the people who care about world problems and disaster preparedness. In order to get past this obstacle without going around and asking everyone if they care about these things or not we had to use our collective knowledge and past experience in order to come up with characteristics that we think people that care about the planet and disaster preparedness would have in common. We decided to assume that three in five people cared about world issues. We also assumed that most sophomores are between the ages of 18 and 24. Another thing we assumed is that college people would have a drive to learn.
http://mikey.ourdigitalplanet.net/team-demographics/
The second example is “map and scale reasoning” assignment. In this assignment we learned about the importance of estimation. The purpose of this assignment was to find the distance between Main Street in Chico and the railroad tracks on three maps each having different scales. The smallest map was very challenging. It was so small that it was very hard to be precise on the measurements. We must be careful to not carelessly estimate. This assignment showed that even one sixteenth of an inch of in measuring could mean that our calculations are off by over a thousand feet. We learned that when calculating distances using maps, it is important to not over or underestimate. We also learned that it is beneficial to use the largest map in order to get the most precise measurements. This will give us the most accurate calculations.
http://mikey.ourdigitalplanet.net/map-and-scale-reasoning/
My final example is the “bus story” assignment. This assignment proved that it is possible use calculations to make accurate measurements. This assignment was one of the first ones we did in this class. We rode the bus’ full route around Chico. Before this we were asked to estimate the amount of time the bus would take to complete the route with only the map of the route. We used our estimation skills as well as math skills to assume the bus’ average speed and the total distance to estimate the amount of time that it would take for the bus to complete it’s full cycle. We took pictures along the way to create a story map of our travelings.