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base ten blocks to us in the US, this application in cludes units through thousands cubes. The first fea ture of this tool that stands out in comparison to other base ten sites is the ability to easily and neat ly duplicate pieces. By using the copy button or the arrow keys on the keyboard, you can quickly add blocks to the workspace in an organized fashion, rather than having to drag them one by one. This tool also allows you to both group and ungroup pieces easily to move between place values. My third - grade colleague used the “ Exchange Down ” feature to introduce her students to subtraction with regrouping before they even knew this is what they were doing. There are many other features of this robust tool including the ability to change bases, but my favorites in addition to those already dis cussed are the whole number, fraction, or decimal tables that can overlay the workspace. The Bar Modelling Tool (Figure 2) is deceivingly simple at first glance, but a few minutes of experi mentation reveal how powerful this tool is. Users are able to add multiple bars that can be shaded, divided, and rotated easily. Bars can be labeled with numbers or text by typing into the shape or with braces above or below the bar. Perhaps the most intuitive feature of this tool is that the bars can be resized both vertically and horizontally, but always at regular intervals. This makes all bars and braces line up exactly, something that would be difficult to do when creating the same image in PowerPoint or Google Slides. While this tool is basic enough for elementary students to use, I con Bar Modelling

sider it most useful as a tool for teachers to create representations to use during instruction or assess ment. Elementary teachers could use Bar Model ling for basic skills such as comparing fractions or part - part - whole problems, or more complex appli cations like area puzzles, number pyramids, or ratio problems (Manners, 2020). The Ten Frame Tool (Figure 3) is a clean and easy to - manipulate tool for primary grades. You can fill and unfill cells of the ten frame with a click. Dots within a frame can be up to five different colors to model addition problems. When you press the “ Random ” button, a random amount of cells are automatically filled in using the last color you se lected. This makes for a no - prep way to have stu dents practice subitizing with quick looks. An addi tional helpful feature is the ability to change the number of rows and columns in the frame, making it easy to model teen numbers and larger. One overall strength of MathsBot is the great breadth of tools available. The three described above just barely begin to scratch the surface of more than 100 tools and applications available on this site. There are elementary classroom staples like Pattern Blocks, Cuisenaire Rods, and Reken reks, as well as more obscure tools like Hungarian Frame, Prime Factor Tiles, and Tak - Tiles. Another strength is the consistency between the tools. Many have, for example, the same copy arrows for dupli Ten Frame Strengths and Drawbacks

Figure 2: The Bar Modeling Tool

Virginia Mathematics Teacher vol. 47, no. 1

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