Units for Problem Solving

In the late 90s NASA lost a $125M Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used a different set of measurements while NASA used the metric system for a key operation of the spacecraft. This created issues with the navigation information. For example, it came too close to Mars because of this error, and started malfunctioning. Imagine that in this day and age, such issues routinely occur.

I’ve interviewed 100s of students over dozens of campuses in the last decade for roles like business analyst, business associate, programmers, product managers, etc. and saw that they routinely struggled with units. That’s why I decided to create this course.

Units are such a foundational part of everything we do that having a strong grounding in this is critical. For example, you’re deciding between a gasoline powered car and an electric car – how would you calculate the cost of ownership of each? You’re installing carpet in your bedroom – how much carpeting do you need?

At the end of this course, you’ll be able to leverage units to solve new problems that come your way. My goal is to help not just to succeed in interviews or standardized tests, but also in your career and in making decisions like the automotive example I mentioned.

The course has four main sections: an intro to the metric and imperial systems of units, areas and volumes, unit chain and a juicy section on problem solving with units where we apply the concepts we have learned to various applications.