Could a comprehensive course geared towards specifically helping people develop mental math skills be added to Khan? A few strategies are taught but not anything complete and I think it would be a wonderful addition to help people become more confident with math especially outside classroom setting.
I definitely agree with you, Bob. It's important to at least know basic calculations without reaching for a calculator, and such a course would give everyone the opportunity to not only review old 'rules' or conventions that one may have learned before, but also a chance to learn new strategies for quickly calculating various things. One may have to also work in certain contexts quickly, such as calculating discounts on products or determining measurements, etc., and content discussing how to evaluate a real world situation in one's head and mentally order the situation with its elements would be wonderful to have.
These are crucial skills that will help everyone out at some point, and I think what you suggest would make a wonderful addition to Khan Academy's content. Thank you for posting!
I've read somewhere that it is a very good skill to be able to do mental calculations if you want to be a business executive. This is a dream of mine, to be one someday. I really hope you would incorporate mental math in Missions or Mastery. Meanwhile, might I recommend the following as a learning resource for mental math:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaNO6y0F6CA&t=1012s
I hope posting this link does not violate the rules. I am in no way affiliated with The Online Courses.
I have a pretty clear idea about how to structure the course: two articles for each arithmetic operation explaining the most common methods to perform mental calculations, plus one article for squaring and one for cubing numbers in your head. I can write the articles by myself and submit them to the content team for a grammar and quality check.
I also wrote a little program to help me practice, so i could put the link in the description of the article and let people use it.
I think i can write one article per week and thus having the course ready in under three months.
How does it sound?
I have a draft of the article on how to square numbers in your head, here it is.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yT2APQYA0Vzhgz0RY_2YswQZcHMxH_kGT3Im-HVvkQ0/edit?usp=sharing
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