Around-the-Globe Math Adventures : Amazing Activities to Explore Math's Multicultural Roots

- Kids make and use some of the world's counting and number systems: From the Chinese abacus using beads, the Inca quipu using knotted strings, and the English tally marks -- not to mention those ubiquitous fingers and toes -- varied cultures have turned to similar ideas for quantifying.
- Kids explore the global solutions to computation and problem solving: Try out the Egyptian multiplication system of arrays while baking an Array Pyramid Honey Cake; see how the importance of pattern in the Persian culture ties in with their lattice method of multiplication.
- Kids see how patterns and sequences are unique in each culture, but they also see that patterns are everywhere, in the tessellated Moorish tiles in Spain, symmetrical African weaving, the Australian Maori tribe's Tukutuku panels and tattoo designs.
- Kids are off to explore navigation systems in Canada and da Vinci's calculations of distance, Germany's applied math in clocks, France's Pascal calculator (to help his dad do taxes), and the U.S.'s Grace Hopper's computer language (and her discovery of the first-ever computer bug!).