After seeing a plug for them on twitter I bought the PCMI books. They arrived yesterday:
The first book I picked up was Moving Things Around since the shape on the cover of the book is (incredibly) the same shape we studied in a recent project.
One more look at the Hypercube
I found a neat problem in the beginning of the book that by another amazing coincidence was similar to a (totally different!) problem we looked at recently:
Revisiting Writing 1/3 in binary
We started by talking about the books and the fun shape on the cover:
Now we moved on to the problem. It goes something like this:
Consider the number 0.002002002…. in base 3. What is this number? How about in base 4,5,7, and n?
We started in base 3 and the boys had two pretty different ways to solve the problem!
Next we moved on to base 4:
Now we moved to the remaining questions of base 5, 7 and N. Unfortunately I got a phone call I had to take in the middle of this video, so I had to walk away while the solution to the “N” part was happening.
We finished up with the challenge problem -> What is 0.002002002…. in base 2?
This is a pretty neat challenge problem 🙂
Definitely a fun start to playing around with the PCMI books. Can’t wait to try out a few more problems with the boys!
Mike's Math Page 