Nick Hill Fireworks Portfolio 10.3.

2011

The school soccer team is planning a fireworks display for an upcoming game. They have figured out that they will launch the rockets from a tower 160 feet off the ground. The rockets will shoot off at 92 feet per second at an angle of 65 degrees. The force of gravity is accounted for by a falling rate of 16 feet per second squared. The team wants to know what height the fireworks will reach and how far they will land from the tower. A diagram of the situation is presented below:

The equation for determining the time it will take is a quadratic equation. When it is graphed it creates a parabola. The fireworks motion on a graph is a parabola. The vertex of the parabola represents the highest point that the fireworks reach. The roots, or x intercepts of the parabola, represent the final destination for the fireworks. These were all parts of the equation that would also tell us how high the rockets traveled for a given amount of t, or time. The equation is shown below:

Also, the distance traveled horizontally from the tower can be found through the equation below:

This quadratic is in standard form, or ax2+bx+c=f(x). The variable, time, is x in this situation. To solve for the variable, we set the y (function of x) to zero to find the xintercepts. In the case of the fireworks, one of the x-intercepts is where the fireworks land. To solve for the roots, I set it to zero and used the quadratic formula to solve for time until the fireworks reached the ground:

To find the vertex, we needed to put the original equation into vertex form. Vertex form is a(h-x)2+y. T he vertex is x,y. Vertex form is tricky because the end product must be equal the equation in standard form. A good trick for doing this easily is knowing that x must be half of b. So x2+y must equal c when converted to standard form. I solved for the maximum height of the fireworks as well as the time it took to reach it by converting the equation into vertex form as shown below:

Finally, we plug in the time it takes for the fireworks to reach the ground into the equation for horizontal distance to find how far the rockets traveled from the tower:

The assignment, Fireworks Height Revisited, was a big step toward solving our unit problem. One of the big questions was how high the fireworks would get and when they would reach that height. We learned that we could find the answers by finding the vertex, and we could find the vertex to any quadratic by putting it in vertex form. Essentially, the assignment consisted of converting the main equation into vertex form and finding the answer to these oh-so pressing questions. It was valuable practice for vertex form and an essential part of solving the unit problem. The assignment I chose to do was Vertex Form Begun. It was an important step towards understanding a crucial concept in the unit. It related the practice wed done in factoring to find roots but this time we were finding the vertex. It was a lot trickier than I thought, but prepared me well for solving the unit problem and made me a lot more confident in my ability to factor.

It was very strange when I checked out the IMP 3 book from the library at orientation. I could hardly believe that I was in trigonometry and needless to say I think I learned a lot about graphing and functions. It has made me more versatile with quadratics and graphing in general, which Im sure will come in handy later on. I began making deeper mathematical connections into why certain equations are the way they are. I think I got a little behind at some points, but I would rate my experience a 3.5 out of 4.