Private Universe : Inventing Notations

This video deals with the students presented with another problem that would challenge them just as much as the other problems. Since this was not the first problem, they were able to jump right in start to organize their thoughts on paper. While one group seemed to get a bit flustered in a short amount of time because of the degree of difficulty, the other group argued about which would be the best way to solve the problem. The level of interest seemed to be a lot higher for every single student in the groups. From the beginning of the problem they had the idea of getting the correct answer but knew that they would have to have conclusions about how they came up with the answer in order to convince others. They also knew that just because they had an answer and everybody agreed, it did not mean that it was the correct one. One student said that everyone needed to be convinced because it was possible that maybe the one student who wasn't convinced could have the correct answer. I was very impressed with the intensity the students work on the problem. The fact that they were willing to eat lunch and then come back to work on the problem meant that they were into it.
The focus was brought to a student because of his unique way of the solving the problem. The fact that he was using binary code to solve the problem was very impressive. He was asked were he came up with the idea, but it just popped in his head. As they worked more with the problem he started to realize a few more things. It shows that children at a young age are able to come up with ideas and think like mathematician without the use of variables or any other algebraic symbol.