Summary
Place value is something we cover in elementary school. It seems simple, but I’d wager that very few adults really understand the topic. I sure didn’t until I worked with non-base-10 number systems in college. Your students can get a taste of this mind-boggling experience by imagining what it would be like if we didn’t have the number 9. What would each digit represent then?
- Students consider what a "numeral" is and just how many we actually use.
- We discuss our ten numerals and how the base 10, or decimal, system works. Then we introduce base 9, pondering what 8 + 1 would equal in a system without a symbol for 9.
- We dig further into Base 9, asking students to [complete a worksheet transforming base 9 numbers into base 10](https://d3cbjw4c6qut3f.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/base9-2digit.pdf).
- After correcting the worksheet, we explore real world number systems: Babylonian, Binary, and Hexadecimal. Finally, students develop their own, non-base-10 system and create two-digit numbers [using this worksheet](https://d3cbjw4c6qut3f.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/my-number-system.pdf).
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