It is often difficult to engage students when it comes to harder concepts in Mathematics. In particular, mathematics involving vectors is difficult to grasp and therefore students are less likely to engage during instruction. To help alleviate the tendency to disengage, teachers can use an image to pull the students into the lesson. Video games tend to be an engaging and relevant aspect to students’ lives.
For this activity we will use the picture above of a golfing game. We can see that the golfer is looking from his ball position (initial point) to the cup (terminal point). We can assign these two points on the Cartesian plane. Using those two points as reference, we can break down the distance from the ball to the cup in to their i and j components on the x and y axis. Similarly, other video games or sports that can be represented in two dimensions can be used to create the engagement with students.
This problem is aligned to :
(+) Find the components of a vector by subtracting the coordinates of an initial point from the coordinates of a terminal point.