Week Three: Chip Models

During the last and final week of this unit, we got very hands on! The way we got involved was by using chip models, or small colored chips, to determine integers.

The first thing to know about these chips is that they are yellow on one side and red on the other. Red means it is negative numbers and yellow means positive numbers. A fun, and easy way our group used to remember the difference was that red represented blood which is always bad, or negative. Whereas yellow is like sunshine, meaning positive or happy!

Just for the sake of simply understanding, in the visuals the blank (white/open) circles are going to be negative, supposed to be the red ones. The dark, filled in circles are going to be positive, supposed to be yellow ones.

For our first example we have the addition problem of 4+(-3)=?

We started it with two groups, one is positive 4 chips (black) and the other is the negative 3 chips (white).

The next step is to combine the two groups into one...

We now have one groups of 4 positive chips and 3 negative chips...

This next step is to match up the positive chips with however many negative chips there are. In this example we have 3 negative chips, which means we will match up 3 positive chips with it. We have done so by placing a box around the 3 negative and 3 positive chips. By matching them up we are cancelling the negative ones out to reach zero to help us reach our answer.

We are now only left with one positive chip...which means... 4+(-3)=1. Our final answer is Positive One!