Place Value Painting- 

Inspired by Wassily Kandinsky's "Several Circles" painting, this project requires students to represent place value with proportionately sized shapes such as squares and circles.  Multiples of each shape reinforce the concept of expanded notation.  For example, 234 = 2x100 + 3x10 + 4x1.  The representation of number is not limited to whole numbers; decimals such as 2.034 could also be represented visually.   Advanced concepts such as the square root of 10 can be used to show why each place value shape is approximately 3.16 times larger than the previous place value shape.  Students create a final artwork (collage, painting, etc) of a number of their choice.  
Video for grade K-2 students also available

Video

Here are two videos created to help facilitate this lesson at different grade levels

Resource pages

Lesson plan

This is a single page version of the
​ grade 2+ lesson plan.  

Hyun Jeong is a high school intern at the Game2Learn Lab and Hyun and a partner developed a computing-infused program similar to this lesson using Snap (block-based programming language).