2022 Volume 46 Issue 2 Pages 209-220
Students face difficulty in acquiring the methods required to decompose a force into two partial forces. This is because in the composition of two forces, the resultant force is compressed into a single force, but in the decomposition of a single force, the decomposed forces vary in direction and size. So, to understand the decomposition of force, students had to understand how to draw the vector arrow and recognize the force as the vector with the direction and size.
For this purpose, the students identified the relationship between the length of each arrow and each angle using the values computed from the experiment and found the change in the component force to be as large as the change in the degree of the angle. On the other hand, on decomposing the component force, most students found that the force size of the perpendicular direction to the original force changed by the angle of decomposition, but that the force size was in the same direction as the original force did not change.
The findings indicate that it is highly effective to decompose the component force and to use the values computed from the experiment in understanding the force as the vector and the relationship among the decomposed angle, the group of the direction, and the size of the component force.
