Bases.

[kw217@mathstodon.xyz]

@futurebird "shapes"? "squiggles"?

[rk@mastodon.well.com]

@futurebird @dancingtreefrog

I still remember calling something the Fth item the list semiseriously and a coworker about slapped me.

[catfish_man@mastodon.social]

@futurebird counting on fingers bypasses that specific hurdle. “Imagine if you only had two fingers, how would you count on them?”

[dancingtreefrog@mastodon.social]

@futurebird Yeah, confuses non-techies. Hexadecimal digits make perfect sense to me, but I'm weird.

Maybe Base36? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36#Base_36_as_senary_compression

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@Catfish_Man

We have done that. I need them to be able to encode characters in binary, or understand how the system we write does that.

[dancingtreefrog@mastodon.social]

@rk @futurebird Hahaha!

[colinthemathmo@mathstodon.xyz]

@futurebird Glyphs ... Then use things other than digits.

[graydon@canada.masto.host]

@futurebird In base 3, there are only three numerals; 0, 1, and 2.

(A number is the thing you write down by using one or more numerals.)

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@rk @dancingtreefrog

I will use any damn thing like a number, watch me go.

[catmisgivings@stranger.social]

@futurebird I am trying to remember how I adjusted to the terminology

I think on some level I just had to commit hard to the idea that something notated as 12 doesn't necessarily map to the WORD "twelve"

Then you can call symbols, characters, etc. whatever you want

[dancingtreefrog@mastodon.social]

@futurebird @rk 👍

[catfish_man@mastodon.social]

@futurebird yeah, tricky. “View this abstraction you’re comfortable with as an entirely different category of abstraction” is always a tall order.

It reminds me a little of the confusion I’ve seen in beginners about the distinction between variables themselves and the values of variables.

[mvsamuel@types.pl]

@futurebird maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerals_in_Unicode

[quasit@kolektiva.social]

@futurebird
Have you ever read "How To Count On Your Fingers" by Frederick Pohl? I taught myself to count in binary on my fingers one night when I was driving on a dark highway after reading that! It's an article, not a short story.

[rk@mastodon.well.com]

@futurebird @dancingtreefrog

In all seriousness maybe different written random symbols like Zener cards?

Be like “oh look, add one to star and you get wavy lines but oh shit you add one to wavy lines and you gotta bring another card in” and later “but what if we wrote the star as (dramatic pause) 1”

(This may be the card sorting exercise you referred to earlier, in that case ignore me.)

But the distinction between sign-and-signified is the single biggest aha moment you can get in CS, IMHO.

[fcbsd@hachyderm.io]

@futurebird while "symbols" might be confusing initially, it seems like the most straight forward, especially as you develop examples, eg you get to hexadecimal 1a = 26 in decimal and your symbols include numbers and letters even though you are still talking about numbers...so symbols would be my approach.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@merms @graydon

They don't have place value. And they use... subtraction. But our students are very familiar with roman numerals for some reason (I think the PE staff uses them a lot?)

I want to bring them out when it can be more obvious how strange they are.

Change the symbols and I don't even know if you could do a sorting problem with them.

[catfish_man@mastodon.social]

@futurebird ok EXTREMELY off the wall suggestion: warm them up to thinking like this by having them read a bit of Through The Looking Glass

[willie1foot@theblower.au]

@futurebird Digits?

[e@az.social]

@futurebird
uhm...as a thought experiment, and based on the principle that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I wonder how it would go to pick three random actual symbols, for instance ^,&,* and count with them, then repeat with three characters like F,K,T, in hope that they could eventually relax with the specific visual representations of the counting operations