Secret Weapon Against Vectors

Physics involves vectors, a whole bunch of them and they're tedious. Usually they start getting tedious after a while, trying to find the vector which couteracts the other 4 vectors or during a quiz. There's a secret tool online and on your calculator to fight against those basic but tedious math.

For physics, on your handy dandy Ti-84, there's an application called Science Tools (abbreviated as SciTools). Go to your application menu and pull it up. In SciTools' menu, choose the last choice (Vector Calculator).

The vector calculator allows you to insert vectors using (x,y) coordinates, polar, do basic addition, subtraction, dot product and cross product. To insert the vector in their various forms, just hit the button under the choice (so for X/Y you would push Y= and for R/Theta you would press Window etc.).

Now as you insert a vector in, you can hit the "Next" button (trace) to work with another vector. After you inserted your second vector, you can use the "Math" button to do operations on the vectors. If you choose the "Math" tab, press the "Select" button to select the vectors you want to do your operation on, and the "Next"/"Previous" buttons to scroll. The result is then stored in V9 (use "Next" to scroll to it). You can then operate on V9 (which is your resultant by adding it to other vectors)

If you didn't understand what I just said, just ask me in class.

-runiteking1

Got comments? Post them below!