Carla Valdez

Carla Valdez

Math 1050

April 29, 2013

Reflection

            One of the biggest challenges I faced when completing this assignment was understanding that a pyramid and a plain triangle do not use the same amount of legos to be built. For the first model I was asked to build, the instructions specified to build a triangle. For this model I ended up using 36 full blocks and 6 half blocks. The sequence for this model was arithmetic and the difference was -1/2, which meant that for each row added, a half block was removed. For the second model I was asked to build a hollow pyramid with a base of 10 full blocks, which only used a half block on top for esthetic reasons. This model used 30 full blocks, and for each row added, two full blocks were removed. This was completely different than if I would have built a triangle with the same number of blocks for the base. If I would have built a triangle instead of a pyramid, I would have used 100 full blocks to build it and 10 half blocks.

            This project helped me understand how I can translate a small model to a larger model as long as the sequence stays the same. I was able to use the same formulas to obtain the sum of the legos used to build a model with a 10 full block base, to find the sum of the legos used to build a hollow pyramid with a 154 full block base.