Conclusion
The goals for this project were definitely met. But this
was not our main need to satisfy, per se. Our mission was to achieve these
goals that were set before us, and also to understand that mathematics have
much more to do with than what is learned in the classroom. Sure, we may
have experimented with paper clips and a chain to come up with an equation
and then to solve it, but this project was clearly not about that. This project
focused on how well we as a group could succeed in handling a real-life problem
such as this. To that, we passed with no problem. We not only learned about
what it takes to solve a complex problem such as this, but the fact that
we worked it out to the end gives us a good feeling. Another things we learned
from this project is how to be able to compare what we have on a graph paper
to what we have in real life. We were actually surprised by the fact
that the solution of the ODE and the function is gave us was so close to
the sample chain we built. This was our main goal of the project.
There is nothing we feel to improve on this project. We
felt as though the degree of challenge was high enough to attain, but not
too impossible. The time granted was enough for us as a group to work on
it. The next step for this project would be to do more experiments like the
one we did, with varying endpoints. The reason why we would do this would
be to make sure that the function that we came up with the first time held
true for the other measurements that we made.
All in all, this was a very interesting, and fun project
to work on. Given the opportunity to work on it again, we think that we would
take the same approach to solve as we did this time.