>Peter Turnbull wrote:
> > On May 25, 7:15, Hans B Pufal wrote:
> > No, but they can learn. I do EXACTLY that with a PDP-8/e cpu I drag
> > around to show at school exhibitions. The first question I get, of
> > course, is where is the screen and keyboard. I teach the kids binary,
> > than, with the aid of a small program left in the core we calculate the
>
> > mean of a sequence of numbers entered in binary. And not a screen or
> > keybaord in sight. This demo ALWAYS gets good reviews....
> Exactly what I did with my 8-year-old niece at Christmas. She's really
> into "sums" and arithmetic at the moment, so when I wanted to play with
> my 8/E, I taught her a little about binary, showed her how to read
> octal off the switches and lights, and we added some numbers. She
> loved it.
Jerome Fine replies:
With my grandchildren, I discovered a way to make binary
numbers interesting. We started with the concept that each
finger represented a ZERO or a power of two.
All fingers down was ZERO.
Baby Finger UP was ONE.
Ruby Ring UP was TWO
Both Baby Finger and Ruby Ring was THREE.
Tobby Tall UP (by itself) was FOUR
Tobby Tall and Baby Finger was FIVE
Tobby Tall and Ruby Ring was SIX
Tobby Tall and Ruby Ring and Baby Finger was SEVEN
Peter Pointer (by itself) was EIGHT
Peter Pointer and Baby Finger was ...
We rarely got beyond this point since everyone was
laughing so much by then, by it made the game a lot of
fun.
If they were able to grasp the meaning of powers of two
and get to EIGHT, then they already knew what having
Peter Pointer and Baby Finger were supposed to mean!
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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Received on Thu May 29 2003 - 16:13:00 BST