Math Tricks and Why?

Recently I bumped into a "Math Tricks" post on Instagram, and I got really annoyed by it. I was like:

 "NOO, it's Math, everything is so provable, there are no tricks there, everything is science, we should teach methods and not tricks!"

But, I just stopped for a moment, and thought to myself, ok, let's make things more fun, while at the same time letting the kids know how the tricks worked. I managed to find the gold-middle for myself, to reconcile with the tricks, and use them to enhance the math problems and topics. 

And that's how I got myself onto the "MATHEMAGICIAN" stuff. Yeah! And what I would like to share with you here, is another trick (Besides my first vlog "Guess the Number") 

You will need a partner, and preferable your partner should be equipped with a calculator, not underestimating no-one, but here we have some 8-digit number division 😀

First step, take a piece of paper, write down the number 73, and give it to your partner.

Next, tell your partner to pick any 4-digit number and enter it twice in the calculator. For example, 

Now, for better effect, you can keep your hands in air, so your partner (or audience) can see that you're not using a hidden calculator, and tell your partner that the number is divisible by 137, and ask him/her to do the calculations, but without telling you the result.  

The next step will be to tell your partner to divide the result with the original 4-digit number (example 4567). Your partner has got the number 73 as a solution 😉

And the final step, ABRACADABRA and you can ask your partner to read 👀 (check) the number. You can ask: Has my prediction come true?" hahah of course it has

Any 4-didgit number written twice is the same thing as multiplying the same 4-digit number by 10001. Our example 45674567 stated  above is actually 

10 001 x 4567= 45674567

Now, if you use the factor tree for 10 001, we will get:

You are breaking the initial number into it's factors different than 73, which will be left to be the magical result 😀

You can use the same method for 2x 3-digit number 1001, with its factors: 7,11 and 13. This trick can be used for fortune-telling. The final result can be arranged in that way your partner will get a 7 -lucky number, or 13-unlucky number. 

Thanks for reading this article. These are just some of the "tricks" we can use when teaching factors, long division and so on. 

Lastly, I have to mention that promoting some numbers as a lucky or unlucky can be hot- discussion topic, so just be precaution with it.