This week a new student and a 6th grade student were working with materials to understand how to convert numbers from the Base 10 number system to and from Base 2 (binary), and then to and from other base systems.  They spent the better part of the morning on this work, and also created a chart to make their conversions more efficient.  They quickly found patterns and short-cuts and together we celebrated their discoveries.  

Later that day, the older student took his thinking about this topic even farther and wrote the following in his journal:

“What would it be like if we used Base 15 instead of Base 10?  What would the numbers be like?  Plus, why do we use Base 10?  Why does Base 10 suit us and did someone choose Base 10 or did we find out about the other bases later?”

I’m looking forward to helping him begin to answer his questions!