Have your dc learnt about binary / counting in bases other than 10 in maths?

[Sadik]

Just curious - dd went on an event today for yr 10 pupils interested in taking maths/further maths A level. She was telling me about it, and that in one of the sessions the opening qu. was along the lines of 'who knows what binary is'. She gave a minimal summary answer assuming this was a noddy-lets-get-this-started question, but it became apparant that many of the others there either hadn't heard of binary at all or didn't really understand what it was.

We talked about it, and she says that she thinks they haven't ever actually studied non-base 10 counting in school (she knows about it because 'well, y'know, it just is, isn't it').

I'm sure even in the depths of history 1970s we did non-base-10 counting in primary (at a minimal level - wiggling our toes to count in base 20 - that sort of thing). I also don't quite see how you understand place value if you don't do not-base-10-counting? (Or understand how your computer works if you don't know what binary is )

Literally (and I mean literally) laughed out loud at that!

I went off and googled. I'd use cusinare to demonstrate binary. I can see how teaching ternary would benefit from cusinare.

I mentioned it as our tutors on pgce talked about 'base' and referred to cusinare then.

Maybe only binary!

You might well be right. I think I'd struggle to explain bases without a pen and paper. But I'm not a teacher!

No! It works with ternary too!

I have some at home; I'll try to demo sometime. Might be tomorrow though.

Arranging like this would help. For all bases.

Bugger didn't attach

Loving the Jokes!

Currently at home planning my Year 7, 8 and 9 lessons and the part of the curriculum for these year groups in their Computing lessons (a lot of schools will still call it ICT though) is here:

"Understand simple Boolean logic [for example, AND, OR and NOT] and some of its uses in circuits and programming; understand how numbers can be represented in binary, and be able to carry out simple operations on binary numbers [for example, binary addition, and conversion between binary and decimal]"

So at some point in Year 7, 8 and/or 9, all students should be taught the above - it is not just if they take it for GCSE anymore.

In the 1980s in primary school we had a wookbook that included a section on binary. We were told that we were skipping that bit as we didn't need to know it. So I guess it fell off the primary curriculum between the 1970s when others on the thread learned it and then.

I got my Dad to teach it to me when we skipped it as I wasn't happy to have something in a workbook at my level that I didn't understand.