Elementary School Gimmicks

Digits in sticks

Maybe it helps if the digit itself can be counted.

Number slides

When I noticed a young kid able to do simple calculations with things, depictions and spoken numbers significantly better than with amounts written in digits, I wondered if learning could be helped by making the abstractions that digits are, explicit WITHIN doing calculations. This resulted in designs for 3 'machines', where every number is always also represented in an amount of circles (or emoji).

Slide Spelling (Dutch):

First reasonable paper prototype: shifting 'tens' and 'ones'.	But naming amounts is a little bit more irregular than that. To figure that out: a minimal concept:
Which together with the notion of needing physical constraints for how layers can be moved relative to each other, resulted in the current digital design: The on/off of the trema, so "e" or "ë", is not taken into account (yet)
Of course we need a english version as well, where "eleven-fifteen" and "sixteen-nineteen and "twenty and up" show there's irregularity in the order of things in that language too.

Slide PlusMinus

Showing that adding and substracting are the same thing in a different direction.
And sneaking in the concept of negative numbers.
The first reasonable paper prototype:

The UNDER CONSTRUCTION digital design:

Slide Multiply

The first reasonable paper prototype:	Built from a background:	with the following mask on top of it twice, for both horizontal and vertical directions:
To also introduce the important concepts 0 and numbers above 10 the current full digital design is:
But let's make a cleaner sliding design based on

I made a (still jerky, bugfix welcome) digital version of it that you can play on touch screens. Try by clicking this image:

Some more ideas for learning numbers and calculations:

A static multiplication matrix, with a layout to get a sense of prime numbers

A variation on this find:

Numbered kid juwelry

• Rings/bracelets that show digits (similar to what's on combination lock). With a viewing window to read the number from and to keep 2 rings together. Highlight zeroes as those trigger 'carry over'. Of course those high-tech knitters thought of the same:
  
• Necklace with beads that each have a number, starting with zero and from there add one every time (somebody must have made this, though the closest I got to finding it was this Or the 5ct character on a cubic bead at De Museumfabriek

Egg boxes with labels to help with counting and carry-over

Built them. Just waiting for some time to shoot the video.

Jumping from one number to the next on tiles or carpet

Font of characters kids learn writing, so I can type a text that kid can practice to write

At my kids school they did use the "Aan Boord" writing method

Pattern Recognition that does ping or BUZZ based on handwritten or spoken numbers

Call it AI if you want

note:

• http://www.petercollingridge.co.uk/tutorials/svg/interactive/dragging/