Saw a really cool tweet from James Tanton today:
Tonight I sat down with the boys to make sure they understood the problem. They noticed that half the numbers would have no powers of two – good start! After that observation they started down the path to solving the problem really quickly. In fact, my younger son thought that we might have a geometric series.
Since we covered a few ideas pretty quickly in the last video, so I stared this part of the project by asking them to give me a more detailed explanation for how they got the 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, . . . pattern in the last video. It turned out to be a little harder for them to give precise arguments, but they did manage to hit the main points which was nice.
At the end of this video my older son was able to write down the series that we needed to add up to solve the problem.
Now that we had the series, we had to figure out how to add it up. My guess was that they’d never seen a series like this, but my older son had a really cool idea almost immediately – rewrite the series!
The boys were able to sum the series in this new form – so yay!
At the end of of the last video my younger son said that he was surprised that the “expected value” wasn’t zero since zero was the most likely value. In this part of the video we talked a bit more about what “expected value” meant.
Once we had that I asked what I meant to be a quick question -> is the expected number of 3’s higher or lower. It turned out to be a longer conversation than I expected, though, because my older son was actually able to write down the answer!
Definitely a fun problem. I think it is fun for kids to see how to add up a series like the one in this project. I also think it is fun for kids to explore some of the basic ideas about primes that pop up in this problem.
As an aside, one other place where I’ve seen the series that came up here is in this post from Patrick Honner:
Proof Without Words: Two Dimensional Geometric Series
His “proof without words” for the sum is this picture – can you see how it works?
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