The Abacus

The abacus has been around since ancient times and apparently is still used in some places. The abacus was once widely used and is known as soroban in Japan, suan pan in China, schoty in Russia, coulba in Turkey and choreb in Armenia for example. Maybe it would be fun to introduce them again into the classroom and use it to teach a bit of history and to organise speed calculation competitions between teams using an abacus and ones using pen and paper. As you surely know the abacus uses sliding stones to count but you may not know like me that the word calculate comes from the Latin word for pebble : calculus.