Fingermath may be an alternative to the abacus for instructing visually handicapped children in mathematics. This article describes a preliminary study conducted with three visually handicapped elementary school children who used the abacus but had never learned fingermath. The results indicated that the transition from one method of computation to the other did not cause confusion and that skill with fingermath can be acquired extremely quickly. Determining the relative efficacy of the two computational methods will require more complex long-term studies.
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