Understanding Place Value (A)

We are so used to the decimal place value system that we have internalized it completely. The number names used by us are also closely related to the system itself. We cannot think of them in a completely different way.

One way we can help them is to show an example which does not "name a number" using the place value system.

We take the example of a "dozen" pencils and demonstrate how the way we would write "dozen" with numerals would change depending on the "base" of the system we use. Dozen is not a number name which reflects the place value.

We see that the appearance of the number changes with the base used.

For convenience, along with the "value of the "base" we also give the numerals which would be used.