All curricula teach some content, and also lead children to learn some role in the society. It is easy to see the content part. For example, this unit is about multiplication, and that is that.

Understanding about roles requires a subtle analysis of learners' actions in the curriculum. Do the tasks encourage leadership qualities such as analysis and planning, or are they always separated into prescribed little steps? Are there subversive, tongue-in-cheek tasks that invite children to question the authority of the book and seek unusual routes, or is the solution path always prescribed, straight and narrow? If we draw an analogy with a factory, do children's activities resemble that of managers, supervisors, or conveyor belt workers? If we compare the curriculum to a book, are children writers, editors, critics, or readers? The content part of the curricula answers the easy "What?" question. The role part is about the harder questions: "Who?" and "Why?" The history of curriculum development shows that some curricula were meant to grow soldiers, engineers, slaves, deeply religious people, factory workers, communists, aristocrats... Who are children becoming as they go through this or that curriculum, and why?

"All successful games utilize a series of simple, yet satisfying repetitive exercises to achieve larger, more complex goals" (warcry.com, 2007). This is a powerful general project supervision principle: give your employees a larger goal and a series of small, easy steps towards it. Does it also apply to all successful curricula? In practice, much like the famous "cheap, fast, high-quality service," most math curricula provide two out of three: simple and repetitive, and even that is enough to get to those larger content goals. Risking to go where no successful man has gone before, I will take a different approach. It is obviously dangerous, hence "adventures" in the title. The reason to choose this approach is all about roles in the society.

Each part of this multiplication unit is a somewhat complex, possibly frustrating, unique one-time exploration that leads to elegant, formal, and clear simplicity at the end. This approximates how many professional researchers, developers and artists work. They start from a mess of complex investigations among horrible jumbles of disorderly data, and gradually move toward creating well-organized, understandable and satisfying theories, or works of art, or products. The satisfaction of this process is immense and addictive, but based on a different psychological mechanism than the satisfaction of simple, repetitive exercises to achieve predefined larger goals. I want to help children develop the craving for that creative power. I want them to taste, if on a much smaller scale, what it is like to be a researcher and an artist - a creator. I would not want children to only learn conveyor belt roles through their math curricula - least they spend their lives only going through a series of repetitive exercises to achieve someone else's larger goals. Learning to do that type of supervised work is also important, but, again, plenty of math curricula out there already prepare children in that role.

This is an introduction to a new series of activities related to the multiplication table. It's based on the old, and popular, multiplication site I made some dozen years ago. 

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