Thank you for a beautiful applet! We used this in a Math Club today, together with the poster "You can count on monsters" from here: http://www.math.brown.edu/~res/PosterPrimes/pos... Kids and parents were making up their own ways to "tally" numbers. Erin noticed that there is no consistent rule to how groups are formed. For example:
- 6 is "three groups of twos" but 12 is "two groups of two groups of threes" 14 is "seven groups of twos" but 21 is "three groups of seven"
We were wondering if there is some hidden logic and beauty in this choices - or are they random to show the variety of possibilities?
Thanks for your feedback. I'm really glad that this resource is still being used to teach maths!
The ordering of the primitives is random, but if you click on the bar on the right (that shows a 2 and a 3 in circles for example) and drag them into a different order you can make "three groups of two" into "two groups of three". I made the application very quickly for my own class, and never really finished it, so some of its features are a little bit hidden.
Thank you for showing me the monsters poster. I had no idea it existed; it is lovely to see someone has a similar thought process to me!
mariadroujkova
Alec, how cool! I am sending this on to the Club members. Maybe you can just draw a little "hand" icon next to numbers, or some other symbol for "drag me." I really like this feature.
The poster's author, Richard Evan Shwartz, just published a book based on it. I sent him your applet's link yesterday, and he did not know about it - he said it's really neat.
I am working on a similar idea from a different angle, still: finding "essential multiples" in nature or culture. Some examples are here: http://www.naturalmath.com/multpics/index.php However, this software turned out to be so clanky I disconnected it from the front page of the site. I plan to continue this using a better tool, like Prezi, LiveBinders or Wallwisher. Thank you for the inspiration!
Derek Davies
I tend to use this instead of sieve method. Have got several classes to think about primitives Your website/this page is very useful thanks
