Dimensional Analysis with DERIVE Original Research Article

Computer algebra systems (CAS) are not only useful for relieving us of boring and/or difficult algebraic calculations (and numerical ones as well) but more and more they are used within mathematics education to gain more insight, to focus on the basic concepts, and to open many fields of applications for students at secondary school level. Besides all the standard items including Precalculus, Calculus and Linear Algebra, we have found CAS useful to cope with several other fields in maths education. In this article, we will focus on a partial aspect of physics teaching which from my own experience might have caused and might still cause problems for generations of secondary school students: working correctly with physical quantities and units. For us the CA program DERIVETM has proved to be a cheap, compact, and easy to manipulate tool to work with and without any special hardware requirements. The ideas presented can easily be transferred to other CAS. As there is now a CA-able pocket calculator the last of the examples will show using that revolutionary calculation tool.