Students' Real-World Problems

Problem-solving process of a Real-World situation

1.       Read/understand problem: Initially, we had to read the problem together and try to understand what exactly we were needing to find. If we weren’t reading a problem from a textbook, this part of the process would involve us determining that we needed to know how far away the ship was from the shore.

2.       What does this look like? At this point we needed to take what we comprehended from our problem and visualize what we needed to find.

3.       Need to solve for distance, x, and the second side to the ship. After visualizing, we were able to think about different ways that we could solve our problem.

4.       We drew out what we were visualizing to confirm what the problem is and to help us decide which method to utilize.

5.       After visualizing and drawing the problem and analyzing methods we could use, we decided that the Law of Sines would work really well because we had the appropriate measurements and data.

6.       Before we could use the Law of Sines, we needed to find one measurement. We found an angle in the triangle so that we could use it correctly.

7.       Then we used the Law of Sines by writing down the correct measurements at the right parts. Then we computed it.

8.       Then we interpreted that this number was the length of the ship to the shore.

9.       In context of the problem, we evaluated that swimming to the ship is a very bad idea because it was a far distance.