Packing blocks as much as possible is a critical skill for learning to compute with understanding. Once your collection of blocks is packed as much as possible, you can easily figure out how many digi-blocks you have.
| These students are packing their blocks. We’ll see how this packing will help them discover how many blocks they have. |
| How many blocks do we have here? To find out, we will pack them as much as possible. |
| We start by getting a holder so that we can put blocks into it. |
| So far, we have packed five blocks. |
| Now we have packed 10 blocks. |
| By covering the filled holder with another holder, we create a block-of-10. |
| After we continue to pack, we have two blocks-of-10 and are in the midst of packing a third block-of-10. |
| We continue to pack until no more bigger blocks can be created. |
| Once we are done packing, we know exactly how many ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands we have. Now we can determine our number. |
| If the blocks are not packed as much as possible, we can’t assign one digit for each size block. |
| Let’s do another example. This time, let’s take a larger collection of loose blocks and pack them as much as possible. |
| So far, we have packed several blocks-of-10. There are still more blocks to be packed! |
| We are done packing the single blocks into blocks-of-10. But we are not finished yet, because the blocks-of-10 can be packed together. |
| We can pack the blocks-of-10 into a larger holder. |
| Now, we have created a new larger block – a block-of-100. |
| We are done packing as much as possible. |
| We can set the digits to find out what number this represents. |
