{"id":979,"date":"2008-02-08T15:44:36","date_gmt":"2008-02-08T07:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=979"},"modified":"2014-07-06T10:51:34","modified_gmt":"2014-07-06T02:51:34","slug":"friday-math-movie-the-amazing-abacus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/videos\/friday-math-movie-the-amazing-abacus-979","title":{"rendered":"Friday math movie - The Amazing Abacus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I first arrived in Japan for a four-year stay, I was very surprised at the number of people I came across using the abacus (called <span style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">&#x305d;&#x308d;&#x3070;&#x3093;<\/span> - <b>soroban<\/b> in Japan).<\/p>\n<p>Most banks and post offices had rows of well-dressed Japanese women at the back, feverishly working away at some extraordinarily important calculation using their abacus. Was I really in the country of high-tech efficiency, the country that brought us the hand-held electronic calculator in vast numbers?<\/p>\n<p>For basic arithmetic operations, abacus users can get their answers lightning fast.<\/p>\n<div class=\"videoBG\">\n<iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" width=\"480\" height=\"303\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wIiDomlEjJw\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div>\n<p>The portion towards the end of this video where the kid is doing the calculation without the abacus reminds me of the savant-like abilities of some people that I featured in an earlier video: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/videos\/friday-math-movie-the-rain-man-in-each-of-us-830\">The RainMan in each of us<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The value of the abacus is that it gives a strong visual and kinesthetic model for learning the decimal place system. See also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/mathematics\/kane-dead-reckoning-computer-391\">Kane Dead Reckoning Computer<\/a> for more on making math concrete using physical calculating machines.<\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\"><a href=\"#respond\" id=\"comms\">Be the first to comment<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The abacus is still widely used in Japan. It's one method of making math more kinesthetic - and it's often faster than a calculator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}