The 'Why': Why do we use the current number system?
Because Place value is taught to Primary students, many come in to lessons with a working understanding of 'what' place value is and 'how' it works.
What is often not made clear, is the motivations behind it.
The early part of this lesson gets students to understand that numbers (as we think of them today) are in fact symbols that represent a value and that many other systems existed before this.
It then gets students to understand why it would be inconvenient to have a new symbol for every single number and how handy the positional notation system is.
Some students will go on to ask "Why do we count in tens?"
This leads nicely into talking about different bases and binary as extension.
Activities included:
Number Symbols from the past
Counting systems throughout history
Representing Number activity
Design your own Number system
Where our symbols came from
The History of 10
Positional Notation activity
Problem Solving Questions
Different Bases
Counting in Binary