Assignment 1: reflection

We delivered a group presentation that explored both ancient Babylonians and modern methods for identifying reduced Pythagorean triples, and we further delved into demonstrating the proof of the cosine law and its practical applications. My responsibility was to explore an extension of the Pythagorean triples, for which I chose the cosine law. I selected this topic because I believe it's a concept commonly taught and applied in secondary education. While I'm aware that the cosine law has numerous practical applications, I was still uncertain about which specific application to demonstrate in the class. Then, I recalled a news article I had seen in the past about the SFU cable car project, and it reminded me of a classic problem that involves both the Sine and Cosine Laws in determining the length of the cable. Due to time constraints, I only opted for this particular problem as part of the class activity. If time allows, I might consider selecting another problem that involves finding angles given three sides, and allocate more time for everyone to perform the calculations.




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