By Stephanie Sorrell-White
Just like any athlete, Scott Flansburg said he needed to warm up before working out.
Before an assembly of about 700 students from several school districts in the Herkimer County Community College gymnasium, Flansburg did just that, but not by doing stretches or laps around the gym. He instead exercised his mind.
The first thing he did was add the number 0+1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9, and then multiplied random two-digit numbers picked out by students and did long division without the use of paper or a device.
Flansburg, known as “The Human Calculator,” showed off his skills during Tuesday’s assembly.
Schools that had students attend the event included Benton Hall Academy, Dolgeville, Frankfort-Schuyler, Ilion, Mount Markham and West Canada Valley.
Flansburg, a Herkimer native and a West Canada Valley High School graduate, has seen international success with his ability to calculate mathematical problems. His nickname was given to him by former talk show host Regis Philibin, and he has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Ellen, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show and Stan Lee’s Superhumans on the History Channel. Flansburg is also the ambassador for World Maths Day 2011 and is a spokesperson for www.mathletics.com.
As Flansburg spouted out the answer to equations, Jean Smith, a math teacher at Benton Hall Academy in Little Falls, entered the numbers so the students and other teachers in the audience could see the correct answer. The screen was to Flansburg’s back so he could not see the answers.
Flansburg showed, too, he is faster than a calculator when computing the numbers given.
Because of this skill, Flansburg name is in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Flansburg urged the students to start thinking like a calculator.
“If you want to turn on ‘your’ calculator, you need to start at zero,” he said.
After having the students use “their” calculators for equations such as 3+3, he noted the answers they gave were more through memorization. “When you talk about math, you have to be calculating, not memorizing,” he said. “You have to turn on the calculator in your brain to feel fluent in math.”
The fourth- and fifth-graders eagerly participated in the event, clamoring for the microphone when it was passed around to give Flansburg the next set of numbers to calculate and shouted out the answers when he asked them a question.
Organizers of the event said the purpose of it was to get children excited about math.
“We want to get them early so that they’re interested in math and science,” said HCCC President Ann Marie Murray. “And to keep them engaged and entertained for the entire presentation, which was a whole hour, that’s a great thing for them.”
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Monday, November 28, 2011
Monday, October 3, 2011
The Human Calculator puts Tara and Scott to the test
PHOENIX -- It's almost time for The American Math Challenge, and there's no better person to talk about it than Scott Flansburg, whom you might know as The Human Calculator.
Flansburg stopped by 3TV Monday, not only to give Tara Hitchcock and Scott Pasmore the lowdown on the upcoming challenge, but also to issue them a challenge of their own.
Watch the video above to find out who was the better "mathlete."
The American Math Challenge is Oct. 12-13, 2011. Up to five of the top-ranking students will represent the U.S. as student ambassadors for the the 2012 World Education Games.
For more information about Flansburg and his endeavors, log onto www.scottflansburg.com.
Click here to learn more.
Flansburg stopped by 3TV Monday, not only to give Tara Hitchcock and Scott Pasmore the lowdown on the upcoming challenge, but also to issue them a challenge of their own.
Watch the video above to find out who was the better "mathlete."
The American Math Challenge is Oct. 12-13, 2011. Up to five of the top-ranking students will represent the U.S. as student ambassadors for the the 2012 World Education Games.
For more information about Flansburg and his endeavors, log onto www.scottflansburg.com.
Click here to learn more.
Why we need to zero in on mathematics
Every child can be a ‘human calculator’, writes Sue Blaine
IT ALL comes down to nought. No, really. According to The Human Calculator™ (I love the “TM” bit), Scott Flansburg, World Maths Day ambassador and Guinness world record holder as the person able to perform maths functions with accuracy at the fastest speed, the biggest mistake we make is teaching children to count from one to 10.
“We teach kids to count from one to 10. We should be teaching them to count from zero to nine,” he says, emphatically. “If you do that, all the pattern and simplicities of numbers reveal themselves to you.”
It’s a thought. Teaching our children to count from zero would bring home the idea that it is a number of worth, not an add-on. If rulers, scales and so on did not start at “0”, cakes would flop and, more important , so would buildings, bridges and aircraft .
Flansburg has spent more than 20 years debunking the myth that some people are not “maths people”. He has appeared on Oprah, the History Channel’s Superhumans, and the Discovery Channel. To earn his Guinness world record, Flansburg had to add the same number to itself more times in 15 seconds than a person could do with a calculator. He gave 37 answers.
He was in SA last week, sponsored by Mathletics, an online “learning environment” aimed at schoolchildren that has more than 1-million paid subscribers from 27 countries.
Rob Masefield, Mathletics’s GM in SA, says it has been an exciting year for maths awareness, with Johannesburg the host city for World Maths Day.
“Maths,” says Flansburg, “is a huge subject, with many areas, but arithmetic? Anyone can do it. The reason people are not good at higher forms of maths is because they are not good at simple maths.”
Flansburg has also found someone who’s better at arithmetic than him. “Oh yes,” he smiles. “She’s 11.”
Priyanshi Somani was the youngest participant of the Mental Calculation World Cup 2010 and won the overall title, claiming it from the other 36 competitors from 16 countries, after coming first in extracting square roots from six- to eight-digit numbers in six minutes and 51 seconds, second in addition (10 numbers of 10 digits) and multiplication (two numbers of eight digits).
Flansburg is helping the girl promote herself. “If little girls know that an 11-year-old girl is a maths champion, that would inspire them .”
That would be good. Maths has a reputation as a tough and scary subject and Flansburg says the big problem is that kids are getting through primary school not understanding basic arithmetic operations. “All they know is they hate it.”
They hate it because they are scared of it, and they are scared of it because no one has shown them the patterns in maths that make it work.
“Take multiplication. We’re all taught one way to do it, but there are several. We need to teach a child how to do it in whatever way makes sense to them. People think in different ways. We make it impossible for each child to think things out on their own. We make kids memorise their multiplication tables, but they need to figure out first how they work. Then they can memorise them.”
This tack would certainly impart a good stab at eradicating SA’s scandalous school mathematics failure: the 2003 Trends in International Maths and Science Study — the last one in which SA participated — showed SA to be the class dunce among the 46 countries that participated. For one, it is clear many children do not understand the mechanics of multiplication; researchers have found hundreds of little lines in exam page margins, used to count out single digits from the number one to multiplying six by six. Six little lines will be drawn in six rows, then the number of lines simply counted.
Flansburg uses an old adage: Maths is the universal language.
“It’s the introduction to logic. It’s the most powerful, most precise and popular language on the planet, but what we are dealing with is mass illiteracy in that language. That’s what innumeracy is, and it’s an epidemic. People think zero doesn’t count. That it’s nothing.”
He leans over, proffering his cellphone, switched to its calculator. “When you turn on a calculator it starts at zero. If it started at 1 then 2 plus 2 would not equal 4. Only zero allows maths to work…. Knowing about zero is like getting a new pair of glasses.”
In another life, back in 1988, Flansburg was a 25-year-old demobilised US Air Force Office of Special Investigations techie working in computer programming, when his supervisor’s eight-year-old son failed maths.
“He asked me to help and I sat down with his son and showed him some short cuts.
“The next day the teacher called our office and asked me to talk to the other kids because the boy was amazing everyone.”
Flansburg went to chat to the children, showing them the simple pattern he had “discovered” that “turns on the human calculator in all of us”.
It works like this: take my age, 39. Add the three to the nine and you get 12. Subtract 12 from 39 and you get 27. Add two and seven and you get nine . Let’s do another one. Subtract two from 11 and you get nine . Another one? 12 minus three equals 9. Take 55 and subtract 10. That’s 45. Now add four and five . You get nine .
Flansburg says this pattern is repeated ad infinitum. Why? Flansburg says it’s because nine is the highest single-digit number. “I discovered this on September 9, 1999 (or 9/9/99) when I was on the 18th hole on a golf course with Alice Cooper. He asked me why 18 adds up to nine (1 + 8)…. That got me thinking, ‘Why does every sum add up to nine?’. I tried every number, my social security number, phone number, bank account. It worked every time.”
At the school, the teachers were abuzz and Flansburg was asked by the principal to speak to the whole school. Then teachers spoke to other teachers, and he found himself talking to other schools across Alabama. Then he went on television.
“That was the day I got the name ‘Human Calculator’. That was 22 years ago; 8038 days ago. Wow, time flies!”
“I had no book, no product, I was just visiting schools. Then corporates brought me in to show staff, for an hour, how to have fun with maths. Two friends told me, ‘We’ll handle all the stuff (of what was fast turning into a guest speaking business), you do what you do’. By the early 1990s I had a book deal, an infomercial, corporate appearances. I still wake up and can’t believe it. To have a God-given gift is one thing. To have the chance to use it to inspire others…”, he says of the business that has made 100m in sales since 1988.
Calculators should not be given to children, says Flansburg. “They’re a crutch. They take away opportunities to see patterns in mathematics. That’s why mental arithmetic is important — you see the patterns and experience them. ”
Mathematical patterns are everywhere, he says.
“Look up the Fibonacci numbers (named after Leonardo of Pisa, who was known as Fibonacci, who introduced the Fibonacci integer sequence to Western European mathematics). Your mind will explode. It’s so incredible that it is impossible that there is not some order in the universe.”
Go on, look him up. You’ve got nothing to gain.
blaines@bdfm.co.za
Click here to read more.
| Published: 2010/11/11 08:02:18 AM |
IT ALL comes down to nought. No, really. According to The Human Calculator™ (I love the “TM” bit), Scott Flansburg, World Maths Day ambassador and Guinness world record holder as the person able to perform maths functions with accuracy at the fastest speed, the biggest mistake we make is teaching children to count from one to 10.
“We teach kids to count from one to 10. We should be teaching them to count from zero to nine,” he says, emphatically. “If you do that, all the pattern and simplicities of numbers reveal themselves to you.”
It’s a thought. Teaching our children to count from zero would bring home the idea that it is a number of worth, not an add-on. If rulers, scales and so on did not start at “0”, cakes would flop and, more important , so would buildings, bridges and aircraft .
Flansburg has spent more than 20 years debunking the myth that some people are not “maths people”. He has appeared on Oprah, the History Channel’s Superhumans, and the Discovery Channel. To earn his Guinness world record, Flansburg had to add the same number to itself more times in 15 seconds than a person could do with a calculator. He gave 37 answers.
He was in SA last week, sponsored by Mathletics, an online “learning environment” aimed at schoolchildren that has more than 1-million paid subscribers from 27 countries.
Rob Masefield, Mathletics’s GM in SA, says it has been an exciting year for maths awareness, with Johannesburg the host city for World Maths Day.
“Maths,” says Flansburg, “is a huge subject, with many areas, but arithmetic? Anyone can do it. The reason people are not good at higher forms of maths is because they are not good at simple maths.”
Flansburg has also found someone who’s better at arithmetic than him. “Oh yes,” he smiles. “She’s 11.”
Priyanshi Somani was the youngest participant of the Mental Calculation World Cup 2010 and won the overall title, claiming it from the other 36 competitors from 16 countries, after coming first in extracting square roots from six- to eight-digit numbers in six minutes and 51 seconds, second in addition (10 numbers of 10 digits) and multiplication (two numbers of eight digits).
Flansburg is helping the girl promote herself. “If little girls know that an 11-year-old girl is a maths champion, that would inspire them .”
That would be good. Maths has a reputation as a tough and scary subject and Flansburg says the big problem is that kids are getting through primary school not understanding basic arithmetic operations. “All they know is they hate it.”
They hate it because they are scared of it, and they are scared of it because no one has shown them the patterns in maths that make it work.
“Take multiplication. We’re all taught one way to do it, but there are several. We need to teach a child how to do it in whatever way makes sense to them. People think in different ways. We make it impossible for each child to think things out on their own. We make kids memorise their multiplication tables, but they need to figure out first how they work. Then they can memorise them.”
This tack would certainly impart a good stab at eradicating SA’s scandalous school mathematics failure: the 2003 Trends in International Maths and Science Study — the last one in which SA participated — showed SA to be the class dunce among the 46 countries that participated. For one, it is clear many children do not understand the mechanics of multiplication; researchers have found hundreds of little lines in exam page margins, used to count out single digits from the number one to multiplying six by six. Six little lines will be drawn in six rows, then the number of lines simply counted.
Flansburg uses an old adage: Maths is the universal language.
“It’s the introduction to logic. It’s the most powerful, most precise and popular language on the planet, but what we are dealing with is mass illiteracy in that language. That’s what innumeracy is, and it’s an epidemic. People think zero doesn’t count. That it’s nothing.”
He leans over, proffering his cellphone, switched to its calculator. “When you turn on a calculator it starts at zero. If it started at 1 then 2 plus 2 would not equal 4. Only zero allows maths to work…. Knowing about zero is like getting a new pair of glasses.”
In another life, back in 1988, Flansburg was a 25-year-old demobilised US Air Force Office of Special Investigations techie working in computer programming, when his supervisor’s eight-year-old son failed maths.
“He asked me to help and I sat down with his son and showed him some short cuts.
“The next day the teacher called our office and asked me to talk to the other kids because the boy was amazing everyone.”
Flansburg went to chat to the children, showing them the simple pattern he had “discovered” that “turns on the human calculator in all of us”.
It works like this: take my age, 39. Add the three to the nine and you get 12. Subtract 12 from 39 and you get 27. Add two and seven and you get nine . Let’s do another one. Subtract two from 11 and you get nine . Another one? 12 minus three equals 9. Take 55 and subtract 10. That’s 45. Now add four and five . You get nine .
Flansburg says this pattern is repeated ad infinitum. Why? Flansburg says it’s because nine is the highest single-digit number. “I discovered this on September 9, 1999 (or 9/9/99) when I was on the 18th hole on a golf course with Alice Cooper. He asked me why 18 adds up to nine (1 + 8)…. That got me thinking, ‘Why does every sum add up to nine?’. I tried every number, my social security number, phone number, bank account. It worked every time.”
At the school, the teachers were abuzz and Flansburg was asked by the principal to speak to the whole school. Then teachers spoke to other teachers, and he found himself talking to other schools across Alabama. Then he went on television.
“That was the day I got the name ‘Human Calculator’. That was 22 years ago; 8038 days ago. Wow, time flies!”
“I had no book, no product, I was just visiting schools. Then corporates brought me in to show staff, for an hour, how to have fun with maths. Two friends told me, ‘We’ll handle all the stuff (of what was fast turning into a guest speaking business), you do what you do’. By the early 1990s I had a book deal, an infomercial, corporate appearances. I still wake up and can’t believe it. To have a God-given gift is one thing. To have the chance to use it to inspire others…”, he says of the business that has made 100m in sales since 1988.
Calculators should not be given to children, says Flansburg. “They’re a crutch. They take away opportunities to see patterns in mathematics. That’s why mental arithmetic is important — you see the patterns and experience them. ”
Mathematical patterns are everywhere, he says.
“Look up the Fibonacci numbers (named after Leonardo of Pisa, who was known as Fibonacci, who introduced the Fibonacci integer sequence to Western European mathematics). Your mind will explode. It’s so incredible that it is impossible that there is not some order in the universe.”
Go on, look him up. You’ve got nothing to gain.
blaines@bdfm.co.za
Click here to read more.
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