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In Ancient times (1960s) I my first encounter with vectors
was in my senior year HS physics course, and this was at a
highly respected College-Prep HS. The fact that there was a
Calculus class offered was unusual for the day.
Not sure when vectors show up (if at all) today, but I would
suspect that most math teachers working with them might opt
to concentrate on the component method. For my Algebra based
courses I used to do a mapping lab (using local maps) with a
series of directions (throwing in some simple kinematics) to
find one's way around to some 'clever'
destination from campus. Three methods were
used--constructing vectors right on the maps, constructing
scale vectors on graph paper and then laying out only the
resultant on the map, and breaking each step into East/West
and North/South components to construct the final resultant
vector. Then, as was my preference, we dealt with most
multi-dimensional problems by breaking them down into
one-dimensional problems through deconstruction and then
possibly reconstruction of the 2 or 3 dimensional vectors
involved. Again, my guess is this would be the approach of
most HS math/physics teachers.
rwt
On 10/3/2015 3:21 PM, John Clement wrote:
Actually I did not encounter vectors until HS, so the editoral you
probably does not apply to most people on this list.
John M. Clement
Houston, TX
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