Unit Conversions & Dimensional Analysis
How To Pick Conversion Factors
The aspect of dimensional analysis that tends to trip students up the most is picking conversion factors, so we'll take a crack at that all by itself in this video. We'll also talk about the theory of unit conversions (aka how the heck this stuff works), and figure out the easy way to decipher conversion factors cleverly hidden in word problems.
One Step Unit Conversion Problems
This video demonstrates a ton of basic unit conversion problems -- kilograms to grams, meters to millimeters, years to days -- as well as some funky word problems. What all these problems have in common is that only one conversion factor is needed to get the answer.
Multi-Step Unit Conversion Problems
Unless you've watched the previous two videos about dimensional analysis, I wouldn't recommend this one! But once you're ready, this video covers how to do multi-step conversion problems, meaning conversions which require two or more conversion factors to solve. At the end there are a couple of super-hard problems, and we'll discuss the way to approach crazy hard problems.