Saw a neat tweet from Gary Rubinstein yesterday:
This morning I thought it would be fun to look at the “Russian Peasant” multiplication video with the boys. Here’s Rubenstein’s video:
I had the boys watch the video twice and then we talked through an example. My older son went first. He had a fun description of the process: “It is like multiplying, but you aren’t actually multiplying the numbers.”
Next my older son worked through a problem. This problem was the same as the first one but the numbers were reversed. It isn’t at all obvious that the “Russian Peasant” process is commutative when you see it for the first time, so I thought it would be nice to check one example:
Next we moved to discussing why the process produces the correct answer. My older son had a nice idea -> let’s see what happens with powers of 2.
The last video looking at multiplication with a power of 2 gave the kids a glimpse of why the algorithm worked. In this video they looked at an example not involving powers of 2 (24 x 9) and figured out the main idea of the “Russian Peasant” multiplication process:
This was a really great project with the boys. It’ll be fun to work through Rubinstein’s videos over the next few months. I’m grateful that he’s shared the entire collection of ideas.
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