How to teach binary numbers to a child?
A fun way to learn binary numbers using ice cream sticks.
My 7-year-old son goes to a Montessori school and is used to working with materials to learn mathematics.
I didn’t want to interfere with the school’s curriculum. So, I decided to teach him something that his school would never teach him — binary arithmetic.
When I taught him the traditional way, the way I was taught using a paper and pencil, in terms of powers of 2, it just didn’t work. He was frustrated that he wasn’t getting it and I was irritated that he did not get something as simple as 1,2,4,8,16 and their positions on a paper.
That’s when I decided to introduce ice-cream sticks to represent the binary numbers.
Binary sticks
The rule was simple.
- Each stick had a fixed number of dots on one side and the other side was blank.
- The number of dots in each stick was an exact power of 2.
I made 6 such sticks starting from 1 and going all the way up to 32.
The Game
My son loves learning by playing games. So, I decided to have some fun by making a game out of the ice-cream sticks.
I would say a number out loud and he would have to give me exactly the sticks whose dots add up to the given number.
For example, if I said five, he would give me a four-stick and a one-stick. If I said eleven, he would give me an eight-stick, a two-stick and a one-stick.
I would gradually introduce new sticks by giving him larger numbers until we reached a point where we ran out of sticks or patience. 😂
The Binary Rule
Once he became comfortable with giving me the sticks with dots adding up to the number he was given, we upped the ante.
The new rules were…
- All the sticks should be placed face down starting from the highest number to the lowest.
- Only the sticks that add up to the given number have their face up.
- If a stick has its face up, it is represented by a 1; 0 otherwise.
So, the number 5 would be represented by 1–0–1.
The Reverse Game
In this, I would give him a binary number and ask him for its decimal equivalent.
For example, I would give him 1–1–1. He would use the materials to arrange the sticks and count the number of dots to give me the decimal number 7.
Soon enough, he figured that he didn’t have to count all the dots each time. He knew by looking at the cluster of dots that it was either a 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 or 1. So, he would just add the powers of 2 to get the decimal equivalent.
The Increment-decrement Game
Given a binary number represented by the sticks, I would ask him to increment it by 1.
Usually, it would be sufficient to just flip the last digit. But, if it already had its face up, it would require some additional flipping.
Likewise, for decrement, it needed some additional flipping.
I’ve captured these in a short video I made with my son.
Conclusion
This was such a hit with my son that I taught it to his friends and there’s now a healthy competition amongst them.
Also, I was careful not to introduce any new jargons like power-of, exponent, etc.
There are lots of Youtube videos out there where binary is taught only as a set of rules that can feel dry for a student in Primary.
I plan on introducing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division as well in the same way.
I hope you found this interesting. Do give this a shot and let me know in the comments section if this worked with your children.
Though this was for my 7-year-old, I’m sure it would work fine for children as young as 5 or 6.
Credits
I found this post How to teach binary numbers to kids using a cool math trick? by Rajasekar Elango that prompted me to make this one. I found that intriguing myself, I can image how it must’ve felt for the middle school kids whom he taught.
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