First and Second Day!

Hey everyone! My name is Melissa and I hope all of you had a good semester break and that your exams went well for you! I'll be the first to post for our class and on the first day of Pre Cal 40S, we had a slideshow that Mr.P created (and I'm sure I can speak for all of us that his opening credits were pretty awesome). We discovered that Mr.P expects us all to have Apple products but unfortunately he won't supply us with them.... :(  We also had a quick introduction of each other names and an interesting fact about ourselves.
After the ice breaker, we were presented with the topics and course outline that we will be following from now until June. He showed that in order to pass this course and be successful, we need to be on top of your homework and always ask questions if we don't completely comprehend a concept. However, I am sure all of us will be up for the task and finish high school on a great note! Afterwards, we received 2 worksheets of problems that we've seen before in previous years from graphing to factoring to identifying the domain and range and seeing if it was a function or not (keep in mind the vertical line test for that!) And that concludes the first day!
On Thursday morning once we got our textbooks we began with our first lesson but not before we watched the Monkey Business Illusion. Just goes to show Mr.P likes to mess with our heads, luckily some of us caught on with the background tricks. We first learnt about the Fundamental Counting Principle and how we can get the total amount of combinations in a certain scenario without actually having to go through the whole factoring tree which is pretty time consuming. The pictures below with show our first example with the tree. To make things simpler, we learnt that since we need one sandwich, drink and dessert, we can just multiply the amount of choices we have (in this case 2 sandwiches, 3 drinks and 2 desserts) we can get the exact same answer as the tree just without all that drawing and writing. I've also included that paragraph that explains the keywords that we'll see throughout the semester and is a good reminder as to what operation you'll need to use to figure out the equation correctly and efficiently.

Afterwards, we received a quick assignment would be our homework for the night and it went over all the concepts we learnt in the morning class. That concludes the morning of our second day!

In the afternoon we jumped straight into Factorial Notation! We learned the basics of factorial notation, which included learning that factorial is represented by an !, we've been lied to our whole lives, I thought an exclamation point meant when you were exclaiming something exciting or joyful we'd use that....not anymore....We just went over simple equations and what it meant and how we could solve them with and without a calculator. Also finding little tricks like when you have 3! it results in 3(3-1)(3-2) which equals 6. But an easy way to find 4! is just taking the answer from 3! which was 6 and multiplying it by 4, which gets  you the answer of 24. It's a simple yet good tip to keep in mind. And that concludes the first two days of Pre Cal 40S! Hopefully we'll all get to know each other better and I wish you the best of luck in your last semester of high school!