Thorsten Bonow <thorsten.bonow at withouthat.org> writes:
> I'm a high school teacher and I have a hard time convincing my
> students to do their problem solving with units---e.g. when they have
> to calculate a length and get the dimension of a velocity, they know
> that they must have made a mistake.
>
> In this situation it's counterproductive to tell them to forget about
> the units when solving problems with Maxima.
>
> ezunits looked like a good solution, but after running a few tests I
> realized that Maxima's problem solving capabilities are limited when
> doing calculations with units.
>
> Therefor solving it symbolically first and inserting the units
> afterwards is exactly what the students shouldn't be doing.
Well, I disagree. I would argue that if students get confused about
units in calculations, it's actually counterproductive for them to use
software that can deal with it automatically.
My argument is based on what I see from students about my age in the UK,
who went through school before the last government's numeracy
strategy. It was assumed that we owned and used calculators and thus
there was almost no teaching of or practise with mental arithmetic. As a
result, students would make mind-blowingly stupid arithmetical mistakes,
usually due to mis-hitting buttons on their calculators. But, when they
wrote down the calculation, they didn't notice that e.g. 1e5 * 12.3e-2 =
12.3e7 is clearly wrong. And they could be expected to use calculators
for such trivial calculations.
I suspect that the only way to teach students to do dimensional analysis
correctly without having to think hard is to force them to do it by
hand. If software does it for them, that just means that they didn't
have to do the problem, not that they learnt how.
Rupert
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