Math Moment: One Red Paperclip

Math Moment

One red paper clip

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

If your kids have been in school for any length of time, they have encountered this problem:

What if someone offered you a penny for your first day on the job, and then offered to double your wages each day for a month?

This is a lesson in exponential growth, and most children are delighted to imagine themselves with $5,368,709.12.

But at Big Learning we love real-life math, so check out this true story: One enterprising person, Kyle McDonald, started with one red paper clip and is trying to trade his way to home ownership. He doesn't double his value on each trade, but does increase the value considerably. In his first trade, he traded his paperclip for the a pen shaped like a fish. At present, he's managed to trade his way up to a year's rent on a house in Phoenix.

Read the above news article with your kids. You might have fun estimating the value of things to dig more math out of the experience.

Look at Kyle's site on your own http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/ before offering it to your kids. Most of it is fine, but now that he's received so much publicity people are starting to offer some risque things in trade. Some of the stories of his trades are good though, so you might want to select some entries to share with the kids. The home page is G-rated so far, and has photos of every item in the series of trades.

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