Question

How would you teach scientific notation?

Answer 1

Scientific notation is a mathematical expression used to represent a decimal number between 1 and 10 multiplied by ten, so you can write large numbers using less digits.
An example of scientific notation is when you write 4 x 10³ for 4,000.

Answer 2

Answer:

Scientific notation is fairly easy to teach, or learn. To begin with let's start with giving you the definition of scientific notation.

Scientific Notation: An exponential notation for representing very

large/small numbers.

Example: 80,000,000,000 = 8・$10^{10}$

Scientific notation is also represented with a negative exponent if the decimal place is moving backward, for example:

Example: 0.000089 = 8.9・$10^{-5}$

Scientific Notation for Dummies Explanation: Scientific notation is basically making a HUGE number look smaller by taking out the 0's and putting them into an exponent.

Example: 1000000000000 is a fairly big number, now knowing that there are no visible decimal points on this number, you would place the decimal point onto the end since every number has a decimal point (1.0 2.0 just mean the same thing as 1 and 2, right? Easy?) To shorten the number it would be moving the decimal point to the left until all you got is the one by itself.

1000000000000.

Moving it once to the left

100000000000.0

Moving it twice to the left

10000000000.00

Moving it three times to the left

1000000000.000

Finishing the decimal points

1.000000000000

I ended up moving the decimal point 12 times to the left. The scientific notation would end up as:

10 x $10^{12}$

The scientific notation tells you how many times to move it to the right, looking at the 12 it is telling you that the full number is 1 with 12 0's and if it was a negative exponent it would be 1 with 12 zeros to the left, the decimal being in front rather than the end.

You are very welcome :)