Sine City - San Marcos Creek Development Project
Sine City was a project revolving around the law of sine, cosine, and tangent. We the students had to go visit a part of San Marcos that was also part of the San Marcos Creek Development. The San Marcos Creek Development is a project about creating something new and beneficial to the city of San Marcos where there is a large piece of land, somewhere in San Marcos. We were all able to use our understanding of trigonometry and other math concepts to develop a final product that fit the requirements outlined in the specific plan for the area of land. There are many requirements involved in creating any sort of building for the San Marcos Creek Development, and we all had to take them into mind. The students had to create a building on the site they were given in San Marcos. We had to draw out our buildings and plots of land to scale, and we also had to go in Adobe Illustrator. Our final product was a wood model of our site and building that we made by using a laser cutter on pieces of wood, using the design we made on Adobe Illustrator.
Process
Each person had an assigned role. The roles were either an architect, surveyor, engineer, or illustrator. My role was the architect. I had to use Adobe Illustrator to create the online drawings for our building as well as being the architect. I created a plan for our building and figured out what it would look like and what the dimensions of our building would be. I did the elevation views as well for our building. Based on the requirements, I planned according to it. I created my product in Adobe illustrator by converting all the measurements I had created on paper, into the online illustrator. We then took the online drawings to the laser cutter to cut the lines of our buildings on pieces of wood. I had to use math and trig when I was figuring out the dimensions of my group's building, which included the height of the building, the width, the length of the windows, the height of the windows, how many windows there were, and I also had to decide where to put the most windows in our building, which was the south side of our building, due to how the building was facing the sun.
Final Product
Artist Statement
For our plot of land, we decided to build 4 multi use buildings. Our buildings are all 4 stories. Commercial on the first floor and residential on the top 3 floors. There are required setbacks which we incorporated into our buildings: 5 ft on San Marcos Blvd and 10 ft. on downtown core for outdoor seating. The ground floor is 15 ft high, which is the minimum requirement. A requirement for our building was to somehow incorporate the golden ratio, and we did that by having the bottoms of the windows on the second floor start at 5.5 m. The total height is 14 m and the rest of the building is 8.5. 5.5 x 1.6 = 8.8. Although it does not exactly equal 8.8, 8.5 is very close. Another component was to create a sun path diagram for our building and use that to figure out which sides of the buildings will have more or less windows. Since the buildings face San Marcos Blvd the sun will hit the north sides of the buildings so they need to have the least amount of windows. |
Math Learning
Throughout this project we learned quite a bit of math, it was mainly trig. We used trig when we finding the height of different things in our site, when we were analyzing the sun path diagrams, and finding out our awning length. We learned about the golden ration and incorporated it into our buildings. We had to do a bunch of conversions since we did our buildings with metric measurements.
Reflection
My biggest takeaway was how to use trigonometry in real life. Trig has always scared me and seemed so extreme and intense. But once I realized how to use Trig in real life by looking through a straw on a pro tracker at a tree on our site, I saw how relevant trigonometry is to real life. It blew my mind that you could apply trigonometry to nature like that!
My biggest struggle I faced in this project was how hard it was for me to use Adobe Illustrator. It really did not make sense to me at first and I was completely lost, but I got help from Henry and I finally understood it, and created many of the rooms in my groups online sketches on Adobe Illustrator. I really enjoyed visiting our site and planning out the building that we would put on the piece of land. Through this project I grew in how I used the mathematical practice "Look for and make use of structure". I used this because I had to struggle with figuring out what and deciding what would go into my building by following the requirements.
My biggest struggle I faced in this project was how hard it was for me to use Adobe Illustrator. It really did not make sense to me at first and I was completely lost, but I got help from Henry and I finally understood it, and created many of the rooms in my groups online sketches on Adobe Illustrator. I really enjoyed visiting our site and planning out the building that we would put on the piece of land. Through this project I grew in how I used the mathematical practice "Look for and make use of structure". I used this because I had to struggle with figuring out what and deciding what would go into my building by following the requirements.
Exhibition
The exhibition was crowded and a bit crazy... which is how a good exhibition should be! My role was to be the architect and I had to create the Adobe drawings and do the math involved, which was hard, but I got help from my partner, Alaniz. For the actual exhibition, I was standing with my groups interactive component. The interactive was for people to come over to our table and take legos from the bin we had, and to make a building using the requirements we had listed for them to see. Some of the requirements were that it had to have rooms inside the building and that the building had to be 35 feet tall. We of course provided a scale so that the building they would build out of legos would not actually be 35 feet tall. I grew through this whole experience in how I was able to work with group members who don't have math come easily to them. Math does not come easily to me, and most of the time, everyone around me has an easy time learning math. Working with someone else who did not have the ability to absorb math easily helped me a lot because I had to struggle to learn the math involved with trig and try to explain to my fellow group member instead of the usual, myself trying to understand concepts and having it explained to me by someone else to help me understand it. It was challenging having to make sure no one took our legos home with them because people kept trying to take them, and they were not my legos to give. I had to chase someone down who took what looked like a starship from our lego bin. A celebration I have would be how fluid my group members and I were when we presented our interactive and our actual final product. We all took turns switching from the interactive station to the final product station so we could explain different things to the people at our exhibition rather than just having one or two of us stay at one of our stations the entire exhibition.
As you can see, I am contemplating whether or not I should go over to this yellow labrador puppy near our table and move its "gentle leader" leash out of it's eye, and also tell her owner that it isn't nice to have her leash always pulling down on her eye. I look very worried for the puppy's well being and I definitely was; the poor doggy.
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Alaniz is in my group, but Aaron who is standing in front of me in this picture is not in my group. Andrew who is standing next to Alaniz is not in my group either. My group consisted of Alaniz, John Contreres, and myself of course.
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