It is prepared for use, or zeroed out, by laying it flat on a table and pushing all the upper beads up and the lower beads down.

The top portion is called the upper deck and the bottom portion is called the lower deck. When using the abacus, you use either your index or thumb to manipulate the beads. That’s a lot of functions for this small, simple, wooden tool! It can be used to perform addition, subtraction, division and multiplication as well as extract square roots and cubic roots.

Each culture has taken on a slightly different version of the tool. The abacus goes by many names including Suanpan, Soroban, and Shoty. It was first discovered in Ancient Mesopotamia, but made it’s way from the Middle East to Japan, China, Russia and around the world. The abacus is said to be the world’s first calculator. I always said that I was more of a words person, but I believe that numbers could have come easier for me, had I used an abacus to help strengthen my number sense. Numbers have never come really easy for me. It honestly wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned how to properly use the abacus and when I found out, I wished I had learned it’s use much earlier on in life. I couldn’t figure out what the significance of seven beads in each row meant. I’d count each bead under my finger and wonder what the beam in the middle was for. I knew the abacus was a mathematical tool, but I had no idea what each bead meant. Replicating the sound, I’d tilt it down to hear the beads crash again as they hit the bottom. I’d tilt the abacus down to hear all the beads crashing to the top. I vividly remember playing with our old black, wooden abacus in our basement as a child.

How to Use an Abacus and Why Your Child Needs Oneĭid you grow up learning how to use an abacus? Although we had one in our home, in my mind, it was nothing more than a useless wooden toy.

How to use an abacus