What a kid learning math looks like – a challenging base problem

My younger son has been working through Art of Problem Solving’s Introduction to Number Theory book this summer. The topic for the last few weeks has been arithmetic in different bases. Today he can across a problem that gave him a lot of trouble. He worked on it alone for about 15 minutes and then we talked about it.

Here’s the problem:

In a certain base (12)*(15)*(16) = 3146. What is that base?

Here’s the first part which summarizes his initial thoughts on the problem. The work he does here shows that the base used in this problem must be lower than 10. Once he discovers that fact we talked about a few other ways that we could have seen that the base wasn’t 10.

Next we tried to see how we could identify the base we were looking for using some of the ideas from the last video. We used the last digit idea to eliminate 7 and 8, but the last digit idea told us that base 9 might actually work.

Then we did the arithmetic to show that we were indeed looking for base 9.

So, a really challenging problem, but a fun talk for sure. Working through problems like this one are a great way to review arithmetic and a neat way for kids to learn some basic ideas in number theory.