20160720 THE SHNUMBER CRUNCHER:

A toy from the past.

Education is famously retarded. Schools always teach the citizens of tomorrow using yesterday's technologies. Not sure about this particular case, but usually they blame their retardations on the kids.

Interestingly, some tools of the past make very desirable and educating toys, if only they were explicitly repurposed. Teaching riding a horse instead of driving a car would not do much good, but how about a pet horse?

Here lies the problem. The tools of the past usually do not fit the economy of toys. I am trying to teach TLG vector graphics. A toy plotter would be great to have. Some are still available, and the used ones on eBay are not very expensive. I doubt if any of them accept SVG (how about Logo?), not to mention the interface, the driver and the supplies.

If anybody would take a risk to design such a toy and put it on the market, it would probably be too expensive. A toy is a one-time thing. Two times, maybe. The lesson will be learned quickly.

Several years ago I paid close to $300 for a well used Odhner Arithmometer on eBay. After some cleaning and oiling, it works acceptably well. Not sure if I would buy it again, but I am glad that once I did it.

The Odhner Atithmometer was a desktop mechanical calculator. Wikipedia has an article on it. Mine is newer than anything pictured there: The model number is 227.

At school, they gave us a brief course of using Arithmometer, and I did not quite get it. I recalled it when I was trying to teach TLG's big brother multiplication. It was hard, and suddenly I wished I had an Odhner.

It turned out, the Odhners were not common it the US and hard to come by. The idea was haunting me though. I finally bought one when I started teaching TLG' big sister. By that time I knew why I wanted it. The Odhner Arithmometer was a shumber machine. Even my counting apps from SHNUMBERS had a similar interface.

As a pet, the Odhner Arithmometer has many nice features. For example, subtracting 35 from 0 it returns 9999999999965. Unfortunately, this little thing weights 12 lbs, so using it requires my constant supervision.

How a device covered in numbers can be a shnumber machine? Remember, my boards are marked with numbers too. Shnumbers embody quantity. Numbers symbolize it. Mechanical calculators like Odhner's don't use "math facts". The quantities are built in the pinwheels.

The Odhner Arithmometer is great for learning because to multiply a number on the cursors (levers) by N, one have to rotate the crank handle exactly N times (I wish every child would do it to understand what "number crunching" means). Isn't it how it should be? It is, but it isn't. I'll take a closer look next time.