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I was talking about multiplication to my 8 year old, and I was wondering whether it would be appropriate to talk about multiplication as the sum of numbers added to itself many times (i.e. repeated addition). Would sum be the correct term here?

Also, he was asking me what the purpose of finding mean, median and mode for a data set was? How could I explain this in layman's terms to a child?

Thank you!

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  • $\begingroup$ Graham Fletcher has an interesting video on the pedagogy of multiplication. youtu.be/M7T0zNCCOQQ. $\endgroup$
    – John Joy
    Jan 27, 2020 at 16:28

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Yeah, repeated addition is a great way to describe multiplication. Area is another useful framing of it.

I describe central tendency as a desire to describe a whole dataset of numbers as a single number that gives you a sense of the typical datum. Like, how would you describe the height of everyone in a class with a single number? Mean is probably the first idea you might think of, median is like it if you want to reduce the influence of outliers, and mode totally ignores outliers.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks so much for responding! So would sum be the correct term to use when saying multiplication is the sum of repeating numbers? Thank you- this is very useful :) $\endgroup$
    – Star S
    Jan 26, 2020 at 18:20

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