They say the best educators are able to make a complex subject easily understood by a child. Perhaps this is a challenge to us all.
Quarternion mathematics can be quite complex to wrap your head around. For educators out there how are you explaining this to your students from high school.
Is a pictorial method the most appropriate under these circumstances.
Dear Joe Davids
Basically, A quaternion is a four-element vector that can be used to encode any rotation in a 3D coordinate system. Technically, a quaternion is composed of one real element and three complex elements, and it can be used for much more than rotations.
Quarternion explain further here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjMuIxRvygQ
Hope this will helps.
Kind Regards
Qamar Ul Islam
Hi Joseph,
I think the best way to explain Quaternion to kids is to use animation. A single 2d image cannot help. If you are able to make good animation that means you are able to explain any kids. This is my understanding and same way 3Blue1Brown tried.
Hey Joseph,
In my opinion sticking with unit quaternions would be the way to go. At a high school level it may be a good idea to skip the complex math definitions and instead focus on the intuitive "definition" of a unit axis and a rotation about that axis. Depending on the context you could run through an animation/example in 2D or 3D to show how multiplication works, then give the multiplication rules as formulas -- the same way one might do for dot and cross products at the high school level.
I would guess another important question to answer is why a roboticist would use quaternions instead of other representation. Having a short discussion on gimbal lock could be a great motivator, especially if there audience is interested in aerospace applications or robotic arms.
Thanks,
Logan
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