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Starter of The Day Menu | Transum Software

Keywords: Starter | Arithmetic | Calculator | Puzzles
"When entering 4x4-3x3 the calculator does not follow BIDMAS and therfore was confusing for some students."

Helen, Monmouth
Wednesday, September 06, 2006

"Teachers please note. This broken calculator does not obey the BODMAS (BIDMAS) convention. Students will soon find this out themselves. It would be a valuable teaching point to highlight that not all calculators do. Some older calculators will carry out each operation as soon as its key is pressed. Try an example if you are not sure how your calculator behaves.

2 + 3 x 4 =
The answer will be 14 for a BODMAS calculator and 20 for an LTR calculator
See also Reverse Polish Notation"

Transum,
Saturday, September 09, 2006

"The pupils really enjoyed working out the numbers 1 to 20. It created a good buzz in the classroom. I told them in advance that the calculator was a basic calculator and therefore worked from LTR. It was interesting to see which pupils came up with the most concise answers. It was more than a 10 minute starter."

*Kaye Rumpel, Hope Valley College
Friday, September 15, 2006

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This starter has scored a mean of 4.3 out of 5 based on 58 votes.

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Answers

Here's one set of answers, there are many more..


	Teacher, do your students have one to one access to computers? Whether your students each have a TabletPC or share a desktop PC, this activity lends itself to eLearning (Engaged Learning).

Here's the URL which will take
them to a student version of this activity.

http://www.transum.org/go/?to=calc34

A Maths Starter of The Day

Answers