Friday, November 6, 2015

Adding Arrows!

Link to PSet
Answer Key: Pending

You know what we're doing a lot of in first-grade math at school? Adding small numbers. Over and over and over again.

Needless to say this is wearing a bit thin already, so I thought we could extend addition a bit by introducing vector addition in this problem set. If you've ever worked with vectors, you know that all we're really doing is adding numbers in two dimensions, but my thought here was that this was a nice way to start developing intuitions for how to alternate between geometric and algebraic viewpoints. We talk a bit in this problem set about how to develop a notation for vectors that will allow us to work with them algebraically, but most of the actual questions are about drawing vectors in the plane.

Compared to some of the other Psets, this one is likely to be a bit easier, but hopefully still interesting. I'm still working on finding the right level of difficulty and the right level of fun stuff to do, so if you've been working through any of these with your kids, I'd love any thoughts about what kinds of questions have been the most fun to work on. Enjoy!