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Ffs. 16, 8, 4, 2, 1.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. My son is a year and half old. I've been teaching to count on his hand in binary since day 0. He goes wild and celebrates when we reach 31 🙂
My siblings and I always loved the number 4 because our puritanical mother was so casual about sticking her middle finger out at only that moment. That was just about the most taboo thing we could imagine, and it was as a result hilarious.
I'm in my mid 40s, and I've never thought to count in binary on my fingers. I haven't needed to use binary for about 30 years, and I'm easily the geekiest of my friends, so I've never had an excuse to do it for fun.
You've just put a huge smile on my face.
Guess what I'm teaching my kid this week 😁
Most of the time it's not exactly useful and some of the positions are awkward (e.g. 8, 9, 10), counting to 31 on one hand is maybe useful.
More useful IMO is counting in base 6 and treating each hand as a single digit. i.e counting to 35 on 2 hands without awkward fingerings. Better than 10, less awkward than binary.
We're about to start learning how to program, probably with Python, so it could be a good way to start thinking about how computers work. I never would have thought to try other systems though, so I'll look into base 6. Thanks for the suggestion :)
without awkward fingerings
Oh, the fun I would have had with that phrasing if we weren't talking about teaching kids... :D
It does take s little practice but not too much. The awkward positions are easy enough after a few weeks.
I chose binary for two reasons. First, it is occasionally useful to count that high on one hand. Second, the education when he's older. I hope this will give him a note intuitive understanding of different bases. And binary is specifically useful for understanding comported and software development. I dont intend to push him toward a career in software but I think there's a fair chance he chooses that anyways.
Plus we've made it into something fun 🙂
4