Intro to vector and scalars.
At first glance at vectors they looked intimidating to me but after watching the intro to Vector and Scalars on khan academy and getting a simple understanding of what they are really helped.
Some use cases that pertain to this subject are CG lighting and shadow intensity, calculating polygon normal's to see what way your faces are facing and vectors are also used for animation to make them much cleaner, smoother and resizable images for animation.
Vectors have Magnitude/Size and direction
Whereas Scalars only have Magnitude/Size
The example that they used was if you had a brick and moved it 5 meters is it a Vector and a Scalar. Its a scalar as the direction wasn't specified and you only know how far it travelled. If you specified it being displaced 5 meters to the left that is a vector quantity.
Distance is a scalar quantity
Displacement is a vector quantity.
He goes on to expand that if the brick moved 2 seconds in 5 meters and you wanted to find out how fast it went you would need to do 5 meters/ 2 second= 2.5 meters per second this result is also a scalar quantity as the direction is not specified. But if you where to label to do 5 meters to the right/ 2 seconds= 2.5 meters per second to the right and now this is a vector quantity as a direction has been specified.
-When you specify both speed and direction you are going for velocity.
-If you are talking about scalar you are going for distance.
-If you don't give the direction you are talking about speed.
For me these principles aren't hard to understand but i do think it will take more effort to remember them and when to actually use them.
Recognising Vectors
As a vector has both magnitude and distance information one way to represent a vector is with a format like (5,5) as if you were to plot that on a graph it would give you the direction of the vector and the distance from the origin of the graph
Recognizing vector practice
These were two questions designed to see if i can identify the format of a vector and how a vector could be used in the real world. I didn't find much difficulty with these question as i find it easier to put things in a real world context like these questions.
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