The Smart tool called “Indian Abacus”
The magic touch of abacus could be realized only by those who work on it. Abacus takes the mind from the physically perceptible experience to the mentally perceptible one. The movement naturally cannot be sudden and mutative. The aero plane takes a long run on the strip at a speed that it can on the physical run way and plunges into air and gets air-borne taking the baseless space, gliding initially to take a stand in the air with its balancing act. It takes the plane a while to get into the perfect and balanced position. It then ascends as the speed increases with the direction only guiding it. Abacus student too similarly moves from physical computing experience to mentally computing experience. The mind while working with the Abacus too acts in a similar fashion starts with the feel of touch, sight, and the sound and gradually takes on the stage when touch is not a
physical feel and sight is not of the physical bead and the oral calling of sums slowly transforming into the
rhythmic call filling the air.
When the Abacus exponent works in the mental mode, the call of the numbers become clear & loud, as the mind detaches from the physical pull. It tends to move out of the sensory pull, as the touch is not the physical touch and the sight is not the physical sight. The sense of touch and sight are not through the body and the eyes respectively. When the burden of the process of physical touch and the sight are no more a part of the process and the student of abacus has to deal only with half the effort, the hearing will be of very fine quality and the frequency levels are so very fine that the time lag between the call and the manipulation will be felt by the student as very long. The student doing at a high speed enjoys in fact a longer pause (time space) in between the calling of numbers and therefore will be able to pick up the formulae (which are out of the reach of the conscious levels normally) with effortless ease. It could be observed that the student when asked to write the formulae makes an effort to pick up the formulae from the memory and the time taken between such an effort and the one while on the mental mode working will show a gaping difference.
Indian Abacus hence is a smart tool for one to do arithmetic calculations enabling the possibility of working on physical and mental planes led by the image pull, thereby making mental arithmetic learning possible. Normally the children at the primary school levels find it difficult to understand the numbers, which are abstract. When the numbers are supported by the objects/pictures/ visuals, they will be able to relate the abstract numbers with the values thereof easier. In a non-abacus learning mode, children are guided to use the fingers of the hands and
the addition and / or subtraction are done using the fingers, which is again the picture/image oriented arithmetic computation only. The great amount of difference that we can see is the time taken to calculate using abacus and the time taken for the mental arithmetic mode. The speed will be distinctly different and the possibility of change over in speed with such magnitude is possible in abacus physical to mental mode of calculation which will be sadly lacking in non-abacus computation though aided pictorially.
The child also has the advantage of learning the values of the same numbers in different positions – like units, tens, hundreds. The child is exposed in Abacus learning the positional values of the numbers and they are also made to experience addition while subtracting and subtraction while adding creating need for the same. The child, learning the Indian Abacus mental arithmetic, has a peculiar experience, as the learning of subtraction or addition will not be realized by it, though it learns by practically doing it. As the learning advances the child will start understanding the correct mode of computation that it already started doing #BasheerIndianAbacus.
