Vectors - De Laet and De Schutter, 2013
Jan. 30th, 2018 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquetum De Laet, T., & De Schutter, J. (2013). Teaching inspires research and vice versa case study on matrix/vector methods for 3D kinematics. In Proceedings of the 41st SEFI Conference (pp. 1-8).
De Laet and De Schutter are robotics researchers and lecturers of 3D kinematics and statics. They observed that students struggle with the concepts and the notation of the subject and that their struggles were related to challenges roboticists experience with non-standardised coordinate representations and related software. They developed a semantics underlying the geometric relationships in 3D kinematics and a notation designed to make relationships clearer and eliminate errors experienced while working across different coordinate representations.
Neither kinematics nor robotics is a speciality of mine, so I might be phrasing my summary badly. I hope I’m correctly representing the work discussed here. The authors claim that their students have benefited from the new notation, making fewer errors than before, and that roboticists have also welcomed the new notation. I particularly liked two bits of this paper. The first bit is the explicit admission that engineers and engineering students need to be aware of the different terminology and notation which can exist across even closely related disciplines – “it is important that students are aware of the lack of standardisation and the implications this might have when reading textbooks or consulting literature” (p. 2) – which relates to my concern about vector notation. The second bit is the attention the authors pay to threshold concepts, which has long been a theory I have tried to apply to vectors, with little luck so far. Reading this paper has given me some new ideas, not least that I would probably enjoy a SEFI conference!
Do not treat this blog entry as a replacement for reading the paper. This blog post represents the understanding and opinions of Torquetum only and could contain errors, misunderstandings or subjective views.
