Comment Re:@_@ (Score 1) 626
The video is amazing... Although the woman comes to completely the wrong conclusion - all these methods are valuable. Children (no scratch that... people) who see the equivalence of all these methods are much more likely to be able to apply them in appropriate situations and really understand what they are doing.
Without a piece of paper, adding partial products is difficult - so for quick sums, the reasoning technique (breaking 26x into the sum of 20x , 2x and 1x) lends itself well to approximation, which helps in quick decision making.
I'd never seen the lattice method taught in school-maths but was extremely suprised to see her assert that people can't explain why it works? It's an array multiplier - 'My-First-Multiplication-Circuit' from digital hardware design 101.
The question of selecting an appropriate multiplication algorithm is obvious in hardware design since we have clear metrics of power, performance and area to evaluate it against.
Perhaps a better explanation of multiplication methods to children could be derived if we examined them in a framework which explicitly considered them in terms of verbosity, speed and correctness.
Without a piece of paper, adding partial products is difficult - so for quick sums, the reasoning technique (breaking 26x into the sum of 20x , 2x and 1x) lends itself well to approximation, which helps in quick decision making.
I'd never seen the lattice method taught in school-maths but was extremely suprised to see her assert that people can't explain why it works? It's an array multiplier - 'My-First-Multiplication-Circuit' from digital hardware design 101.
The question of selecting an appropriate multiplication algorithm is obvious in hardware design since we have clear metrics of power, performance and area to evaluate it against.
Perhaps a better explanation of multiplication methods to children could be derived if we examined them in a framework which explicitly considered them in terms of verbosity, speed and correctness.
