Thursday, November 15, 2007

Cool cash










Earlier this month, a lottery scratcher game was recalled in the UK because too many people were confused by the concept of negative numbers.

As Ciara Leeming explained in her article For the the Manchester Evening News"'Cool Cash' card confusion":

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some. Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

No comments: