Part of the explanation for the power of the gestures goes to the mind-body connection. What's more, the hand movements turned out to be at the heart of the practice, and without any arm or finger motions, accuracy can drop by more than half. But it turned out that her finger movements weren't really all that dramatic, and on YouTube, I watched students with even more theatrical gesticulations. When first I watched high school abacus whiz Serena Stevenson, her hand gestures seemed like a pretentious affect, like people who wear polka-dot bow ties. To learn something new, your brain needs to be fully engaged Now she gives abacus workshops and has half a dozen different abacus apps to help her students hone their skills on the tool. A technology teacher in Maryland, she started using the tool to teach her students math a few years ago. My sister, Katharina, counts herself among the converts. These sorts of conclusions have inspired groups of abacus devotees, and schools devoted to the practice have been popping up everywhere Los Angeles to New Jersey. “Based on everything we know about early math education and its long-term effects, I’ll make the prediction that children who thrive with abacus will have higher math scores later in life, perhaps even on the SAT," Barner told me. UC San Diego psychologist David Barner led one of the studies, and he argues that abacus training can significantly boost math skills with effects potentially lasting for decades. Researchers from Harvard to China have studied the device, showing that abacus students often learn more than students who use more modern approaches. The word "calculate" comes from the expression “drawing pebbles,” basically using some sort of abacus-like device to do math. The Romans had some sort of counting device with beads. The abacus: an ancient technology with modern relevanceĪs a technology, the abacus predates the making of glass and the invention of the alphabet. Along the way, I learned surprising insights into how people gain new skills. To calculate a problem, you move the discs up and down until you get to a solution.įor much of that evening, Stevenson used a practice called "mental abacus," envisioning the abacus in her mind and then using her fingers to work through the problem.įrom watching Stevenson, I knew that gaining skills on the abacus was more than a matter of counting beads, and so I decided to enroll myself and my two daughters in an abacus course to see if we could also hone our math skills.
The small discs have different values, and the four beads on the bottom have a value of 1.
As I discovered while reporting on a book on the science of learning, the typical abacus has small discs that move up and down on thin posts.
The key to her success was an ancient technology called the abacus.
But she also answered many of the problems correctly, including the addition of multiple five-digit numbers in her head. Sometimes she would get problems wrong and smile and shrug. The movements were fast and exact.įor almost an hour, she used the abacus-based approach to solve math problems. For each question, she closed her eyes, and then the fingers of her right hand began to twitch, a progression of plucks and jerks. A few years ago, I stood in a small basement classroom just outside of New York City, watching a high schooler named Serena Stevenson answer math questions in rapid succession.
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