Target audience: High school physics and math teachers

The concept of vectors has been challenging for physics students because it combines spatial reasoning with trigonometry as well as introducing new concepts. Yet this fundamental concept underlies many topics in science and engineering. Students that are confused by vectors often lag behind in other later subject areas.

This workshop proposes a novel and unified teaching approach by relating a vector’s abstract nature of magnitude and direction to its geometric nature as length and unit vector. This relationship provides students with a vector object that they can touch and feel as well as a holistic definition valid in one, two, and three dimensions.