NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Mark Knudsen
Date: 2017 Dec 24, 17:45 -0600
"What math and science concepts are you trying to convey to your students? What types of examples do you use? Please tell us more. "
The concepts are precision, uncertainty and error propogation in calculations. Just what we often talk about on this forum.
The navigation examples I do every year come up when teaching vectors and waves. In the vectors unit we do simple navigation with aeronautical charts. We do dead reckoning, wind triangles and position from three position lines. The "cocked hat" always sparks some discussion. Since we graph these examples and solve them with trig, the kids see as well as compute answers that often don't agree perfectly and that really helps this discussion. In waves we use seismic charts to locate the origin of an earthquake and then discuss GPS and cell phone positions. OF course, any time students ask a question or seem interested in a related topic I am ready spend a little time on it.
