Jim Propp’s essay on base 3/2 is fantastic:
Here’s a direct link to his blog post in case the twitter link doesn’t work:
Jim Propp’s How do you write one hundred in base 3/2?
and here are links to our two prior base 3/2 projects:
Fun with James Tanton’s base 1.5
Revisiting James Tanton’s base 3/2 exercise
I’m hoping to have time to spend at least 3 days playing around with Propp’s latest blog post. Today we had 20 min free unexpectedly in the morning and I used that time to introduce two of the ideas. They haven’t read the post, yet, but instead I started by having them watch Propp’s short video about the binary Engel machine:
After watching that video I had the boys recreate the idea with snap cubes on our white board. Here’s that work plus a few of their thoughts on the connection with binary:
Next I challenged the boys to draw the base 3/2 version of the machine. After they did that we counted to 10 in base 3/2 and talked about what we saw:
I was happy that the boys were able to understand the idea behind the base 3/2 Engel machine. With the work from today giving them a nice introduction to some of the ideas in Propp’s essay, I think they are ready to try reading the essay tomorrow. It’ll be interesting to see what ideas catch their eye. Hopefully we can do another short project on whatever those ideas are tomorrow morning.
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