So, my kids and I have created a school for the summer, which they have named "The Cherry Lane School of Craziness." Each day we decide what we're going to do, like field trips and projects and such. Yesterday, we made an Abacus out of beads, bamboo skewers, and popsicle sticks. And glue. Lots of glue. Here is where we got the instructions.
It kind of took all day to do this because of waiting for the aforementioned glue to dry, but the results looked pretty good. We started out making an Abacus, which has two beads up top and five in the bottom. Then I went out and looked for pointers on how to use the Abacus to do calculations, at which point I learned that the second and fifth beads in the top and bottom, respectively, are used to do hexidecimal stuff like calculate pounds and ounces and things like that. I was looking for a simpler calculation device so now we are starting in on a Soroban, the Japanese version which has just one bead up top ("heavenly bead") and four in the bottom ("earthly beads").
On an Abacus or Soroban, the decimal places get bigger from right to left just like written numbers. We did a simple one with just three decimal places - ones on the right, tens in the middle, and hundreds on the left.
This is a pretty nice demo on how to use an Abacus, and why those extra beads complicate things - We are still trying to get the hang of it, but I think it will be a cool way to visualize numbers. Plus, there's pretty beads. What's not to like?
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