Practicing and Checking Multiplication With Playing Cards (1)

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Math Mojo has got some surprises for you. New lessons on how to improve your basic math skills, and videos! Professor Homunculus is getting his Video Mojo workin’ to bring you some great new stuff.

The first set of videos will be about how to practice multiplication using playing cards. So grab a deck of cards and let’s get going!

First, take out all the Spade cards from the deck - we’ll only be using those. Then, remove the court cards (the Jacks, Queens and Kings) from those cards. Consider the Ten to be a zero and the Ace to be a one.

Now you’ve got 10 cards, which represent the digits zero through nine.

Shuffle the cards. Now decide, in your mind, which digit you’d like to multiply by.

Deal the cards, face up, on the table so that you can see the faces of all the cards.

Get out a piece of paper and a pencil.

Depending on how advanced you are at multiplication, start at either the right (if you multiply the “school” way) or the left (if you know Math Mojo) of the spread deck, and start multiplying, writing only the answer (not the carries - never write the carries!)

In the video, we’ll be multiplying all the digits from 0 to 9, by 3. It’s simple to start with 3.

After you learn how to do it, try multiplying the cards by the other digits.

We’ll multiply by some higher digits in future videos.

You may have noticed that I don’t know my left from my right in this video. My bad!

Tomorrow we’ll practice checking, using this same example.