Back to school for me

clivetortoise · May 18, 2023, 10:06am

Wow. This takes me back. Took me a while to remember SOHCAHTOA.

If I remember it right, this stood for:

sin(angle) = opposite/hypotenuse
cos(angle) = adjacent/hypotenuse
tan(angle) = opposite/adjacent

It then took me a while to realise that opposite = y, adjacent = x and hypotenuse = startingDistance. Therefore, the x distance (adjacent) = cos(angle) * startingDistance (Hypotenuse) and the y is the sin version.

Must confess, I forgot to multiply the angle by Mathf.Deg2Rad though!

Where were you 15 years ago when I had to explain this to my kids?

Christopher_Powell · May 18, 2023, 2:03pm

Lol, I am learning this right now, in fact I have my sine cosine and tangent workbooks in my backpack🤣 This was definitely a struggle for me for the most part, I ended up sticking with sine as my main option even though tangent is usually easier.

I actually had an interesting story from my teacher to remember SohCahToa. She talked about how a substitute came in for her on the day this was introduced, and he said that we went on a field trip when he was younger and met a tribe leader called SohCahToa, seems easier to remember this was for me, idk why.

Hope everything goes well for you when you learn all this, math isn’t easy!

Brian_Trotter · May 21, 2023, 5:05pm

When I took Trig in the 80s, we were told about the SohCohToa Indian Tribe.

True story, at my High School, computer programming was an impacted course (meaning that far too many students wanted in and the teacher got to be very picky choosy)… We had to come into the course typing at least 60WPM with at least an A- in Trigonometry. One of the final projects was writing an artillery game where you had to tell the gunner the angle and amount of “powder” to put in the armament, and then it would display (in ASCII glory!) the shot as it flew across the scene to hit the tanks or other “enemies”. You quickly learned which students grasped what they’d learned in Trig.