NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Math education and teaching navigation
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2013 Jun 19, 09:07 -0700
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2013 Jun 19, 09:07 -0700
I'm a computer geek and have always lived and worked in high-tech
areas (first Boston's until it collapsed around 1990 and now Silicon
Valley). I also teach navigation courses for the US Power
Squadrons. It's always a challenge doing so with half of my math
students having engineering-level math and the other half barely
squeaking through high-school math.
Set and drift (and apparent wind) are fun to teach. Half the class says "simple vector math problem, next" and the other half is sitting there with their eyes glazed over....
Set and drift (and apparent wind) are fun to teach. Half the class says "simple vector math problem, next" and the other half is sitting there with their eyes glazed over....
On 6/19/2013 5:34 AM, Andrés Ruiz
wrote:
The better prepared you are, the less effort you have to do to learn navigation.
A friend of mine, a lawyer, when he was preparing his yacht skipper exam, had difficulty understanding the set&drift and apparent wind math, because he did not know vector calculus, and had forgotten the basis of trigonometry.
