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Chisenbop is a method of computation using the fingers like an abacus.
Here's a tutorial.
www.cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/chis/chis.html
I think it was popular in the early 1980s, but fell out of favor.
There were a couple of books published:
The Complete Book of Chisanbop : Original Finger Calculation Method (ISBN: 0-442-27568-4)
Complete Book of Fingermath (ISBN-10: 0070376808)
Comments on the value or lack thereof?
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8 comments:
I have all the books on "Fingermath" and tried it out back in the late 80's. At the time I was working with LD students, and how to teach math facts and operations was a focus of my research and study. I got involved in math curriculum writing and searched for alternative ways of learning and doing things.
The students I saw had a lot of difficulty with specific aspects of elementary mathematics: seriation and sequencing (as in steps in long division or regrouping), spatial reasoning and positionality (numerator and denominator, geometry concepts like nets of polyhedra, plotting points on a grid), rote memory, as for number facts and definitions, and so on. Working memory was frequently an area of challenge and so was mastery of algorithms. Anything that held promise of making these tasks easier was something I wanted to know about .
Chisanbop got a fair bit of press in those days, and there were workshops and so forth about it. I made several different sustained efforts to get students fluent in using it, but these attempts were all failures except when I introduced it while teaching number systems to a gifted class. Those kids picked it up easily and could perform rapid calculations (of course they could also do these the regular way, and had success using binary code and other number bases as well).
However, the LD kids did not get the hang of it. They mixed up which hand was ones and which was tens (usually in mid-procedure), had difficulty with the concept of counting the thumb as 5 or 50 and counting up by one or ten from that; they would lose track of where they were in their computation, and remembering what the different positions of the fingers meant posed yet another challenge. It was much more demanding on memory and sequencing skills than paper-and-pencil arithmetic operations, where at least you can monitor what you're doing as you go: you have a stable visual referent.
I'm sure it works better in Korea where students are introduced to this method of counting from the get-go, but it is not a "short cut" for Occidental kids with learning challenges or even a touch of clumsiness. "Kinesthetic" learning does not make things easier when it requires lots of rote memory and repetition before you can begin to apply the kinetic/motor skill to your conceptual work.
Teaching other number bases has faded from the scene (for the time being), but teaching binary and base-5 was helpful to kids to get them to understand our decimal system -- it produced a Eureka! insight. We find now that many middle school kids (general ed kids) lack understanding of the "base 10" system despite years of "manipulatives" and Base 10 blocks.
Chisanbop is probably a great enrichment activity. My gifted class had lots of fun with it.
just another way of changing the subject.
what would we do without palisadesk??
of course, now I'm thinking: Chisanbop!
Fun!
Chisanbop, origami, and National Geographic jigsaw puzzles.
This is bad.
As a math teacher, my dad felt compelled to try this out with me and my brother when it came out. I didn't learn it well enough to do math problems with it, but I do occasionally use it for counting up things when I'm in a situation where I am likely to be interrupted. You get interrupted and then look down at your fingers and say, "Oh, right, I was on 62." It only takes a few minutes to learn it to that level.
Hi,
I was looking around for Chisenbop video and came to this page. Just wanted to add a dissenting opinion to palisadesk comments. My son is autistic and we used Chisenbop with amazing success. He rapidly surpassed my speed. It gives him the visual cue he needs. Also, because he is easily distracted, there is the place holder effect described by elizabethb. If memory and physical coordination are not issues I highly recommend Chisenbop for LD kids.
My son learned this at home before transferring the skill to school. It is not a skill he would have been able to easily learn in a group setting.
I used chisenbop as a child and am now teaching it to my child and the local school are very interested. My six year old daughter is more of a creative type but her maths is coming on leaps and bounds using the chisenbop method.
When I used it as a child, I referred to it as abacus hands as it used in the same way as the abacus my grandfather had (I come from a chinese family).
Anyway, I set up a site to show how the methods can be taught. I have begun to separate the material into martial arts like grades so children have "belts" to aim for. I'm not sure it is the same as the chisenbop book as I have never read it, but this is the way I was taught as a child.
www.netgnosis.org.uk/netgnosis
My daughter is dyslexic and simple math equations always led to tears. She had good help and therapies at school, and I had given her strategies for doing math with objects to make it less abstract. No matter what, math was always a battle that ended in tears. A good friend suggested Chisenbop, and within a few hours my daughter was doing sums with ease. She went from a third grader crying over 9+8 to adding up 52 pennies plus five nickels and ten dimes with ease. Her teachers were amazed!
I am an adult who has always had problems with any basic math that had to be done in my head. I could always use a calculator but in my head was out of the question. I began learning Chisanbop in the early 1980's and have found it to be extremely useful in my everyday life ever since then. Any child or adult who might have some problems would benefit from this system.
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