The four stages of competence model describes the phases you go through when acquiring a skill:
- Unconscious incompetence: You don’t know what you don’t know.
- Conscious incompetence: You know what you don’t know.
- Conscious competence: You know what you know.
- Unconscious competence: You don’t know what you know.
I’ve applied this model to assess competence in binary floating-point arithmetic; let’s see where you stand:
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In the children’s book “One Grain of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale” a girl uses her knowledge of exponential growth to trick a greedy king into turning over his stockpile of rice. Hidden in the story are mathematical concepts related to doubling: powers of two, geometric sequences, geometric series, and exponents. I will analyze the story from this perspective, and then discuss my experience reading it to first and third grade students.
Front Cover of the Book “One Grain of Rice”
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