Numbers Girls Engaged in Math and Science June 2012
How many is this?
What are some different ways we can write that? others? 10 |||||||||| |||| |||| 2x5 ( this works, but there are LOTS of things that equal ten ) ten X (Roman Numeral) tenten what is this?
THE WORD “TEN” What are written words made of? How many letters are there in the English alphabet? How many words can you make of them? Just a guess? 1010 What is this way of writing numbers made of?
Numerals How many numerals are there? Starting from zero, what are the numerals? How many numbers can you make out of these numerals? How come we have ten numerals? Is it because we have ten fingers?
Aliens!!! What if we were aliens with only two fingers?? How many numerals would we have?
2 Numerals How many numbers could we write out of 2 numerals? What is the problem with this? Could a person or alien with two fingers do this?
No, but.... How do you represent 55 with your fingers? Let’s see how we could do the same type of thing with only two digits Okay!! Let’s start counting with two numerals!! 01 Is that it?
Poor aliens! Wait! What do we do on this planet when we run out of numerals at 9? 10 Why? You have put more than one numeral here and you’ve already used these numerals, how can you use them again? What column do you put the 1 in? Why is it called that?
What does this 1 and 0 mean when written in different columns? 10 one tenno ones Is the “tens column” called the tens column because TEN is the first number that needed a new column for you to be able to write it? What is the next number that needs a new column?
What do you have to change to get from nineteen to twenty? one ten nine ones two tensno ones
The aliens are back! If we go back to the two digit counting, we have: 01 we ran out of digits so we need a new column. 10 TWO’s Column
10 one twozero ones this is NOT ten in the alien world, it’s two! 11 one twoone this is NOT eleven in the alien world, it’s ____?
Even though 10 meaning two seems funny to you, it’s because from the time you were a little baby, you were taught that it is called ten, not two. Alien children are taught that 10 is two. You can get used to it, alien children do! 10 means two!!
zero one two three four five six seven eight nine ten 1011 eleven 1100 twelve 1101 thirteen 1110 fourteen
So, NOW how many numbers can you write with two numerals? So, who uses this stuff? What’s this? How many positions does it have? If you were going to give each position a number instead of writing “on” and “off” what numbers would you use?