Kaktovik numerals

To remedy this problem, students in Kaktovik, Alaska, invented a base-20 numeral notation in 1994, which has spread among the Alaskan Iñupiat and has been considered for use in Canada.

[3] The numerals began as an enrichment activity in 1994, when, during a math class exploring binary numbers at Harold Kaveolook middle school on Barter Island Kaktovik, Alaska,[4] students noted that their language used a base-20 system.

The Iñupiaq language does not have a word for zero, and the students decided that the Kaktovik digit 0 should look like crossed arms, meaning that nothing was being counted.

[4][5] These were initially intended to help the conversion from decimal to base-20 and vice versa, but the students found their design lent itself quite naturally to arithmetic in base-20.

[4] The students could keep track of the strokes of the intermediate steps with colored pencils in an elaborated system of chunking.

They have been introduced into language-immersion programs and have helped revive base-20 counting, which had been falling into disuse among the Iñupiat due to the prevalence of the base-10 system in English-medium schools.

[6] Scores on the California Achievement Test in mathematics for the Kaktovik middle school improved dramatically in 1997 compared to previous years.

It is theorized that being able to work in both base-10 and base-20 might have comparable advantages to those bilingual students have from engaging in two ways of thinking about the world.