Recently, I started teaching a new semester of basic electronics at St. Philips College. The first thing we talk about is scientific notation as it applies to metric notation. As part of my teaching process, I build a number line to visually illustrate the relationships between the powers of ten and their metric equivalent.
This time, one of my students, David Solfest, shared the mnemonic that he learned for the negative exponents and made up a new one for the positive exponents.
On the positive exponent side of the number line, reading from left to right, the mnemonic is “Ten (Tera) Grey (Giga) Mountain (Mega) kats (kilo).” Moving to the negative exponent side of the number line you have “my (milli) mom (micro) nits (nano) pelts (pico).”
For some, just memorizing the number line is enough to promote storage of this information in long term memory, but others need something like the mnemonic devices that David came up with. Either way, this is a great tool for learning the different values associated with metric notation!
