How Big Is a Million?
Number · Year 4–Year 6
One dot, then ten times as many. Six presses to a million.
About the a million
A class can read a million out loud long before it means anything. This starts with one dot on the board and a button that says ten times as many. Press it and the dot becomes a ten frame, press it again and ten ten frames make a hundred square, and six presses in the board is holding a million.
Each step keeps a tenth of the picture gold, and that gold tenth is exactly what filled the board a moment ago. It is the part worth pointing at: everything the class had just finished counting is now one small corner, and it will be a corner of a corner by the next press. Going back down with the other button is the same lesson in reverse.
Past ten thousand a dot is smaller than anything a whiteboard can draw, so the tool stops pretending. It draws the biggest block whose own dots have gone and says underneath what one block is worth: a hundred, and then a thousand. Counting a thousand blocks of a thousand is a truer answer to how big a million is than a grey rectangle would have been.
How to use it on your whiteboard
- 1Press the multiply by ten button. One dot becomes a ten frame, and the dot you started with stays gold.
- 2Keep pressing. Ten frames make a hundred square, ten hundred squares make a thousand, and so on to a million.
- 3Read the number beside the picture in digits and in words, or press Hide and ask the class what is on the board instead.
- 4Press the divide by ten button to go back a step. The picture shrinks into the gold tenth it came from.
- 5Tap Fullscreen to fill the board. Reset puts it back to one dot.
Questions
- How many presses does it take to reach a million?
- Six. One, ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. The toolbar counts the steps so you can see how far along you are.
- Why do the dots turn into blocks near the end?
- A whiteboard has about two million pixels on it, so a million dots drawn side by side would be a grey rectangle rather than a picture of anything. From a hundred thousand the board draws blocks instead and tells you what one block is worth, so the number can still be counted.
- What is the gold part of the picture?
- It is a tenth of what you are looking at, and it is the whole of what was on the board one press ago. The line under the number says what it is worth.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Trove Tools is free with no login, no subscription and no limits.