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I learned the conversion factors approach in chemistry but it's really just a basic math process of starting with something in one unit set, having a target uni
by skeeter2020 5y ago
I learned the conversion factors approach in chemistry but it's really just a basic math process of starting with something in one unit set, having a target unit and applying conversions until you get to your goal. It's probably the single most powerful technique I took from public school.
If you think we can teach CS at any sort of non-trivial level without an understanding of math beyond grade 7/8 you don't really know what computer science is. Even if you mean "programming", kids want to primarily build games which involves tonnes of HS math. Even shop courses often involve questions like "find the center of an object".
- nyanpasu64 5y agoI think units are brilliant, and use them extensively in math and programming. However I often get sloppy and conflate conversion factors (60 minutes per hour) and quantities (44100 samples per second). This usually isn't a problem, as long as I use different units for sampling rates (samples per second) and waveform frequencies (cycles per second) instead of calling them both hertz. But things get messy when you're converting between multiple different sampling rates, polyphase resamplers ("64 subsamples per sample" etc.), overlap-add convolution (which has like 3 different quantities all labeled "samples"), and such.