https://www.desmos.com/calculator/scrkfc0qh7 

The first thing I did to start off this project was to come up with a rough plan of what I was going to do. I first started out my playing around with DESMOS a bit and playing with some basic functions to see what kind of things I could do to them to get different shapes. From the start I already had an idea of how I was going to use square roots, semi-circles, and quadratic functions for the different parts of my portrait. I also decided to take a look through the text book in order to get any ideas for how I could incorporate certain functions into my card. This helped me quite a bit as I was having a hard time figuring out where to use exponential, logarithmic, and rational functions into my card, as well as to help me properly draw my bun and get the right shape. After completing my portrait I made a rough sketch on paper for the layout of the rest of the card in order to figure out the spacing. As a final touch I decided to add smaller details such as earrings and a hair tie in order to incorporate some more functions into the picture as well as to help bring the portrait more to life, and display more of my uniqueness.

While I worked through this assignment I ran into quite a few challenges. Most of which I had to just play around with in the end since most of the people I had asked for help also didn’t know how to solve my problems. Some of my problems that I had were trying to shade in my bun which I did end up getting help with, as well as how to transform certain functions or make it so that the shading doesn’t overlap. I ran into quite a few minor problems but managed to work through almost all of them myself mainly through just playing around with the numbers/ restrictions in the function. Some of the aha moments that I had consisted of learning how to manipulate certain functions such as rational functions, which it seems I had totally forgotten how to do until it all came back to me while doing this assignment. The other aha moment I had was when I was trying to figure out how to properly shade and use function notation. When I had finally got the hang of both the notation and the shading I found  the assignment to be satisfying when I would successfully shade a section or put a whole folder in function notation.

My main strategy or plan of attack for this project was that I made sure that I focused on the portrait before anything else and that when doing so I focused on one aspect of my portrait at a time. I did so as a way to stay organized and not get confused at what I was doing. I also made a list of the six functions that were part of the criteria and made a checklist in order to make sure that I got all of them. I found that the folders and function notation did really lessen the workload and made it easier for me to stay organized and keep everything in its place.

Overall I think this project was a good way to really show what you know about functions, and show your understanding of them. By doing this project I got a good reminder of some rules that I may have forgotten from the first part of the semester which I think is good for future reference; it was a good refresher for me. It also surprised me since I thought that this assignment was going to a bit more difficult than it was in the end since I didn’t think i knew that much about functions as I did. It forced me to dig deep down in my brain and really apply my knowledge.