Times-table Grid
I have a passion for educational design.
While homeschooling my daughter during covid lockdowns, I came up with an engaging way to teach times tables using lego.
I wanted to tap into my daughter’s love of building things and also to teach her times tables in a way that gave her insights beyond rote learning. This added an extra dimension to the learning experience (pun intended).
In this video you can hear the reaction from my daughter’s teacher.
Building this physical 3D visualization has provided a useful framework for many learning activities related to multiplication:
- Mental model: Provides a memorable overview of the patterns and relative number values in timestables.
- Engaging: It’s fun to build something real and have pride in the final result.
- Insight: Gives an intuitive sense of scale to the numbers generated by times tables.
- Insight: Building with groups of lego engrains the concept of multiplication as repeated addition.
- Insight: The striped patterns of coloured lego help show the concept of multiplication as a scaling factor.
- Insight: The coloured lego patterns resemble a straight line graph, where the slope depends on the multiplier.
- Insight: The square numbers (from 1×1=1 to 12×12=144) draw out a parabola shape diagonally from one corner of the times-table grid to the other. This can be the beginning of understanding the shape of quadratic curves.