The Convertameter

I had a good idea the other day. 

It's quite simple. 

I call it "The Convertameter".

It looks like this.

That's it. A simple piece of paper with a few words on each side and a dot.

But what can this little baby do?

Let me show you.

You start with a line of zeros and some digits 1-9.

Place the digits to indicate what the value is you want to convert - in this case 1250 grams.

Simply flip The Convertameter over and hey presto!

We have the answer in kilograms.

I gave this little treasure to the kids a few days ago.

They didn't believe I'd thought of it.

"You must have got it off Google!" they said.

Well, no I didn't.

Anyway, we used it for 10 minutes to convert a few grams to kilograms and back again. Here's a few other things that the kids had to say:

This is becoming too easy.

You just move the decimal point three spots over.

When you want to convert grams to kilograms you move the decimal point three spaces left.

If you want to convert kilograms to grams you need to times the kilograms by 1000.

There’s three zeros in a thousand which is how many 1kg is.

1.654 – on this one you just take off the dot.

And with a bit of prompting, they soon realised 

the beauty of The Convertameter.

Well, you could use this for meters and millimeters

Or litres and millilitres

Or kilograms and tonnes

Or.....

I retain all rights to this idea, the name "Convertameter" and the design BUT if you want to use it in your classroom, you can as long as it is not for any financial gain, profit or benefit. Just for educational purposes in your own class okay?