Summer SAVY 2017, Session 6/Day 3- Secrets of the Moli Stone (Rising 2nd/3rd)

Posted by morganr1 on Wednesday, July 26, 2017 in SAVY.

Dear Families,

Wow! We are quickly coming to the latter half of the week already, but our mathematician brains have been working hard! Today we investigated the number systems of different imaginary lands, where instead of using a base 10 system, they used base 3, base 4, and even base 7! Students quickly started to notice patterns across these number systems—noting the multiplicative relation between each place value in a system. We even learned that our use of 60 minutes in an hour or 60 second in a minute come from an ancient Sumerian system where they used a base 60 system!

We also were introduced to a number system from Ancient Egypt. Students looked for patterns in the Egyptian numbers as they tried to match each Egyptian number to the corresponding number in our number system. By working across these number systems, students discovered the value of each Egyptian symbols. We were surprised that unlike our number system, the Ancient Egyptian system can have very large numbers represented by just one character. Tomorrow we’ll look more closely at the numbers system, and think about why there is no numeral that represents 0. We also will look more closely at the Moli Stone to see if all our explorations of other systems have given us enough new tools to finally crack its code!

-Ms. Megan