Exploring Change: Position

Here goes some introductory text.

Investigate

To talk about your position along a line in mathematics is to give the distance and direction from the starting point to point Me. To calculate your distance along a horizontal line, you subtract the x-coordinates of your points.

Measure the x-coordinate of point Me. To calculate the difference xMe - xHome click here. Additionally turn on tracing for point Me and drag along your line.

Questions:

  1. Can you see your path?
  2. What happens to your Position measurement when you are at a location left of point Home? Right of point Home? When you are at point home?

The measurement xMe-xHome is called a directed distance because it gives both the distance and direction between the two points.

Your trace gives a reasonable model of your path, but it is limited to one dimension. If you look at this trace at the end of the day, can you tell what you did? If you traveled back and forth at all, some information was lost. A better model is a position plot, which uses time to expand this line into two dimensions by plotting position versus time. Time is simulated here by the x-coordinate of a point moving on an axis.