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| The opinion of a professional mathematician regarding Abacus One |
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Posted by: John Nicholson - 05-07-2012, 12:31 PM - Forum: John Nicholson
- Replies (1)
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[SIZE="7"][COLOR="DarkRed"]W E Hagstone Emeritus Professor (Hull) Of Theoretical Physics
[/COLOR] [/SIZE]
[COLOR="Red"][SIZE="6"]The Abacus
A Simple Teaching Tool of Immense Power
[/SIZE][/COLOR]
[SIZE="5"]The ABACUS is a superb tool for teaching children the basics of arithmetic. (A further spin-off is that the confidence a child gains from it helps that child also in developing his/her reading skills — as I found whilst using the ABACUS with two of my grandaughters both of whom were dyslexic). It is particularly useful in the form that John Nicholson has developed it — i.e., three columns of plastic counters with ten counters per column. The system is compact, the counters cannot be lost and young children are attracted to it as a playtool.
The simple reason that the ABACUS is so successful as a teaching tool, is that it is a robust, mechanical device which provides children with a concrete realization of all the abstract concepts they meet in arithmetic. In short the child comes ultimately to realize via “playing†with it that all of arithmetic is simply an extended form of counting whether this be for whole numbers (i.e. numbers each of which are usually greater than unity) or for numbers each of which is less than unity (i.e. fractions, decimals and percentages). All of this is attained through the use of the “counters†and “columns†out of which the ABACUS is constructed. The teaching method is breathtakingly simple and the child masters the subject through the brain transferring from the conscious to the unconscious the mechanical procedures associated with sliding “counters†up and down “columns†— i.e. the child develops a mental map. As a result the child moves from “solving†problems in a slow, conscious, mechanical fashion to solving them rapidly in an unconscious fashion — i.e. his/her “mentalâ€arithmetic capabilities rise rapidly and ultimately dominate his/her thinking process because he/she understands exactly the “rules of the game†and why they work. The child also understands exactly what a fraction, a decimal or a percentage means and why you can manipulate them to obtain the solution to any given problem. [COLOR="Red"]This depth of understand also means that, in the end, children can teach other children the basics of arithmetic using the ABACUS as the teaching tool.
[/COLOR]
W.E. Hagston[/SIZE]
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