In math, what are “exploding dots?” I work with students and one of them is taking a course called Exploding Dots. I thought it sounded fun so I looked it up—I’m having trouble even understanding the concept of it, much less how it actually works.
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Okay so I’m not sure if someone else has answered this yet, but I wrote my final seminar for my BS in Math on Exploding Dots, so I can explain this pretty well.
[Exploding Dots](https://www.explodingdots.org/) is a visual way to teach base systems in math. We work in a base 10 system (think place value!), but there are other base systems. Binary is base 2, time is base 60, etc. Practicing working in other bases improves number sense (which is your innate understanding of numbers and how they interact). James Tanton is an Australian Mathematician and teacher, and he created this concept.
In a practical sense, it works much like an abacus or counters. You use a “dot” to represent the value “+1.” Using the dots and the 1<-10 (read “ten one”) machine, you can visually replicate how various operations work. If you draw 2 dots and add 3 more dots, you can visually see there are 5 dots (2+3=5). If you draw 10 dots in the right-most box in the machine they “explode,” and this creates a single dot in the box one to the left. This is how we visually represent 10 dots, by having every dot in the second box be equivalent to 10 dots in the first box, every dot in the third box be 100 dots, every dot in the fourth box 1000 dots, and so on. Through slightly more complicated procedures, more operations can be represented using dots and machines.
Tanton took this idea and created a curriculum around it, with videos, worksheets, and an online course/game. The theory is that if Math is taught this way when students are young, they will have a better conceptual understanding as adults.
Hope this helps!
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