Scientific Notation

I am guiding my daughter in preparing her PowerPoint presentation for her 2-day duty as Math Teacher in celebration of the World Teachers’ Day. One of the 2 topics is she was tasked to discuss was Scientific Notation. Find it easy or hard? I guess pretty easy because you just need to remember simple things in converting numbers from standard form to scientific notation and vice versa. Recall the following:

* Scientific notation is a method of writing numbers as the product of two factors where the first factor is a number greater than or equal to 1 but less than 10 and the second factor is an integral power of 10.

* When the decimal is moved to the left the exponent gets larger, but the value of the number stays the same. Each place the decimal moves, increases the exponent by one (1). If you move the decimal to the right it makes the exponent smaller by one (1) for each place it is moved.

Pointers:

* In writing numbers in scientific notation, you must remember the 2 factors wherein the first factor is equal or greater than 1 but less than 10 & the second factor is an integral power of 10.

* When it comes to decimal point, going LEFT the exponent gets larger and so going RIGHT the exponent becomes smaller. Add 1 to the exponent each place the decimal moves. Going LEFT the exponent is POSITIVE and ergo going RIGHT the exponent is NEGATIVE.

Now get a pen and paper and try the following problems: 1.)  6.8270 x 10^7 ;  2.)  0.000728  3.)  6 271 973 000 000

REMEMBER! The essence of Math education is to make complicated things simple, not the other way around.