Hex for Kids

(Forgive me for being so quiet here. It is my deadline week for work, we’re getting ready to go to DC for a while, and I’m just starting to see the light….anyone care to cook us a healthy meal? We are sick of frozen pizza.)

Camille is doing some amazing stuff with logic and math this year. I am so in awe thatI’m devoting this post to her progress! Not to boast about myself, but her math and logic skills are reminding me of things that I did when I was her age. (I have various reasons to believe that I was advanced in these subjects and had a natural knack, not the least of which is that I earned a degree in applied math from a respected university. I am normally more modest, but this is really in regards to my pride in Camille.)

She took SO long to learn her multiplication facts, I had almost given up on her. I do remind myself that I *still* have to consider what 7*8 is, so arithmetic is no barrier to succeeding in advanced maths.

This year, Camille is whizzing through things akin to:

You have a 6-hour clock whose numbers run from 0 though 5. You are asked to find the time some number of hours before or after a given starting time.

Now 2 o’clock; 10 hours earlier.

and she’s getting the right answers to all the questions. It reminds me of being a kid and grading my mom’s students’ homework about bases (the binary and hexadecimal kinds of bases, fyi). When Camille learns about other systems than decimal, it will be a breeze after this. When do we use this? Well, I use hex all the time to figure out colors for web pages 🙂 More seriously, working in the computer industry, I actually do use binary and hex quite often…

In her fifth grade math curriculum, Camille is working on problems like:

Sam packed 42 kg of rice into one big bag and 6 small ones which are of the same size. The big bag contained 3/7 of the rice. How many kilograms of rice did each small bag contain?

I am quite impressed with how well she can break the problems down and get to the answer! (Note that the curriculum we are using is from Singapore, thus the kilos of rice.)

Camille loves history and science fiction. With those interests plus her math skills, I can only imagine that she will have an incredible array of choices of what to study and pursue as she ages….