undefined | Better HN

0 pointskd5bjo6y ago0 comments

> Do US kids in science class use the metric system?

In general, yes. Though like everything else in the US education system, it’s really up to the local school boards. When I went through a couple of decades ago, we did almost everything in SI units with the occasional oddball problem in traditional units to make sure we knew how to do the conversions.

0 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

tonyarkles6y ago· 1 in thread

Your neighbours to the north do it the same way. In school (elementary, high school), all of the science classes are going to be in SI units, minus maybe a lesson or two in unit conversion. It wasn’t really until engineering school where they started really forcing us to be comfortable with problems that had a bunch of unit conversions; the engineers were really happy to give us problems with grams, pounds, miles, and litres, and expect us to get the right answers.

kd5bjoOP6y ago

That sounds about right. I (vaguely) remember having to do some thermodynamics problems in BTUs and Rankine temperatures without converting to SI, but that was certainly the exception.

Once I got into the engineering curriculum, we were also expected to be able to do simple torque and force problems in pounds (force or mass, depending on context), feet (distance), foot-pounds (energy), and pound-feet (torque). Mostly it was to show that all the concepts work in both systems, I think. In case you found yourself working in an industry that hadn’t switched to metric.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse