Abacus
Abacus is a device used for the purpose of arithmetic calculation. It is a simple device with a wooden frame associated with a horizontal rod (this horizontal rod divides the frame into two parts called upper and lower portions) and beads placed on the parallel rods. This device can be used for the arithmetical calculations and is time saving. Upper portion contain two beads and lower contains five beads attached to respective vertical rods. Place value of the beads get increased from left to right. Large number of calculations can be made at a time on it.
How Abacus Works? Or Abacus Use:
The abacus is a best fun tool in the world for most people to get a good grasp of numbers and to do math with. It helps you learn all about the base ten system (the one we use for ordinary math), patterns among numbers, and how to do math in your head with putting it on paper or board. The reason to use an Abacus, is it will teach you how to manipulate numbers – how each digit is
related to others, how to use that knowledge to get good understanding of performing all the major operations such as Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division.
The abacus will also give you an idea how base systems works. For example, you can use an abacus to do math in the decimal system (in everyday math’s) and the binary system (which is used in computer science).
Understanding decimals becomes easier, when you know how to use an abacus. Exponents and square roots can also be done with a little bit of practice.
Abacus Importance:
The reason which makes children feel it just like their toy and never let them feel bored while doing /performing calculations on it is the simplicity of the device and its look. When we do perform calculations on abacus, a little stress is being applied on the mind and people who regularly perform calculations on abacus do perform calculations more quickly than others who use electronic calculators or devices for the same task.
The process of abacus training / learning is easy for the beginners with less stress applied on minds of children. Every bead of the abacus is assigned a unique value and it’s relatively easy to learn those values and keep performing calculations on the device, as the beads are assigned certain unique values therefore there is no need to keep anything in mind rather keep fingers on the beads and place beads in their calculated positions. The result can be easily inferred from the positions of the beads on the rod.
The main reason behind the fact that even in this modern era there’s a need to teach children to learn perform calculations using abacus.
Abacus Mental Math’s:
It had greatly eased the mental mathematics. Many businessmen and officials of yesterday had found abacus to be a great help to assist in their profession. Mental mathematics could be easy, but when it comes to decimals and complex calculations involving multiplication and division, abacus is the only tool advised.
However, it was in China the abacus was innovated further and used heavily for calculations. Abacus mental math is a technique derived from this very old technique and fits right into the modern day world. Abacus was can be used to promote intuitive thinking, build confidence, provide a sense of achievement, stimulate creativity, improve concentration & mental endurance and enhance problem-solving capability.
Abacus for the Blind:
In Today’s world, where technology helps the blind student to be competitive in school in all subject matters still there is a need for a very efficient tool to improve and enhance the blind student’s capability and skills.
Talking calculators were invented for solving mathematical problems. Despite this invention too, many schools often prefer to use the abacus to teach blind student’s, because it increase the speed and accuracy of the problem solving. Also, easy to handle and portable.
Cranmer abacus, is the tool used for blind students, which allows the child to have a concrete manipulation of the beads that would lead to more in depth understanding of numbers than using calculators. Used to calculate square roots, cube roots, numbers that involve decimals, fractions and even higher level of mathematics. Both the Cranmer abacus and the braillewriter will give better results and will lead to the improvement of the child’s calculating abilities.