Over the summer, I occasionally teach a small summer math class for my daughter and her friends around my dining room table. Mostly to preserve the memory for future years… and to provide a resource to my friends who wonder what their children are learning… I’ll write up the best of these lesson plans in full detail.
In this lesson, the students practiced their skills with multiplication and division to create modular multiplication tables. Though this is a concept ordinarily first encountered in an undergraduate class in number theory or abstract algebra, there’s absolutely no reason why elementary students who’ve mastered multiplication can’t do this exercise. This exercise strengthens the notion of dividing with a remainder and leads to a fun application with encrypting and decrypting secret messages. Indeed, this activity made be viewed as a child-appropriate version of the RSA encryption algorithm that’s used every time we use our credit cards. This was mentioned in two past posts: https://meangreenmath.com/2013/10/17/engaging-students-finding-prime-factorizations and https://meangreenmath.com/2013/07/11/cryptography-as-a-teaching-tool
This lesson plan is written in a 5E format — engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate — which promotes inquiry-based learning and fosters student engagement.
Lesson Plan: Kid RSA Lesson
Other Documents:
Modular Multiplication Assessment
Modular Multiplcation Practice
Mean Green Math 