After doing a thermodynamics lab where we had to measure the area of a graph I thought we where going to have to scan the graph and use some fancy program to find the area. And yes there are programs for this. You can even use MATLAB (check this journal intro). But what we used to do this is called a planimeter. It’s two or one articulated arms that by moving the end of it around the shape you can get the area. A good explanation of how it works is in this website: http://whistleralley.com/math.htm. It also has some other “cool” math explanations. If they were to use the kinds of examples in that website in school more kids might find math usefull. But instead (this is just my opinion) they don’t get interested and they miss the basiscs and they just memorize equations and math becomes a chore; a hard subject.
