Vector addition

Okay, so you know how you love playing with your toy cars and trucks? Let's pretend we have two toy cars, one is green and the other is blue.

Now, let's say we want to see where the two toy cars will end up if we push them at the same time. We can use arrows to show which direction they will go in. The green car will go up and to the right, and the blue car will go down and to the left.

But wait, what if we want to know exactly where they will end up? That's where vector addition comes in.

Vector addition is when we take the two arrows that represent the directions the cars are moving in, and we put them together. We add the green arrow to the blue arrow.

When we do this, we get a new arrow that shows us exactly where the cars will end up! It's like we're putting the two arrows together like puzzle pieces, and they make a bigger arrow.

So now we can see that the green car will end up farther to the right and up than we thought before, and the blue car will end up farther to the left and down.

And that's what vector addition is! We're just adding together arrows to figure out where things will end up when they're moving in different directions.