The Adventure of Number Systems: A Written Report

What is a number? How do we define it? How did it exist? Why does it exist? These few questions are just some of the hundreds, maybe thousands of inquiries on the existence of numbers and their function to our daily lives.

Numbers, they are everywhere: from determining the size of an embryo inside the mother’s womb to choosing the right size and price for a death coffin. That is the reality: that numbers will be and always there, just waiting for something that enables it to move for it to be useful.

Frankly, in selecting the assigned topics for MATH 1, we chose the Number Systems topic because we thought it was the “easiest” among the other topics. Guess first impressions are quite wrong.

In doing the series of activities for our scheduled days, we made a thorough discussion, especially on the concept of the video presentation. We have divided the work into parts, and the schedule was also separated to use the time efficiently.

On the Wednesday, January 15, 2013, we decided to hold first the debate with the proposition: “Which number system is useful and will be useful in the next generation: the decimal number system or the binary number system?” In this manner, we wanted to show that these two known number systems have now existed simultaneously, but which one is efficient to use? Binary numbers are now used for computers for communication, yet decimal numbers are the traditional numbers we have used for the past centuries. It was quite a long debate, yet the decimal number system was favored by the house and for me, it was this number system that I also favored. We then proceeded into an outdoor game where we let the class find clues for stations with number system problems, and in general, they all did well and enjoyed the game.

For the next meeting January 17, 2013, we did our video presentation which was about a guy who is the son of the dean and was threatened by a bomb explosion if he cannot solve properly the given number system problems by the culprit. Along with his best friend, they solved each correctly and yet when it came to the bomb switch, the code they got was just a bluff all along, but yet he knew who the culprit was among the three with big possible motives: the council president along with her friend that hates the school policies and grading system; the teacher who did not saw his dead son’s last breath because the dean has not allowed her to be on leave; and the girl who had a younger sister which life has been miserable by the school and the students, which all turned out to be the guy’s best friend. We came up with this idea to highlight all our group members and to show not only the story’s plot, but the usefulness of the knowledge in number systems that can be easily used if well-learned. Then a game was conducted after it by having an oral drill of number sequences which was enjoyed by everybody.

Learning number systems wasn’t quite easy at all, but since it was a basic foundation in learning all the higher disciplines of mathematics, it was all worth it. The importance of learning them will help us throughout any math problem we encounter. We may not have the answers on what, how, and why numbers came about, but now we are pretty sure that it’s not the beginning that counts, but what will be today and in the future.