Media outlets around the world went crazy over a 5th grade math exam question in China. But they all missed the real story! The problem actually dates back to French researchers in 1979. In this video I present the real story to the viral “Chinese” captain’s age question.

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Update thanks to comment from Markus Schüt: the origin dates back to 1841 in a letter Flaubert wrote! See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_…​

My blog post for this video:
https://wp.me/p6aMk-5rE​

Captain’s age question
“If a ship had 26 sheep and 10 goats onboard, how old is the ship’s captain?”

South China Morning Post
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/societ…​

The Portal (Chinese)
http://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_for…​

RT
https://www.rt.com/news/417231-china-…​

BBC
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-ch…​

Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w…​

Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/can-you-solve…​

Official response (Chinese).
http://news.sina.com.cn/s/wh/2018-01-…​

Sherlock Holmes’ deduction in The Hound of the Baskervilles
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-o…​

Novotná, Jarmila, and Bernard Sarrazy. “Model of a professor’s didactical action in mathematics education: professor’s variability and students’ algorithmic flexibility in solving arithmetical problems.” The Fourth Congress of the European Society in Mathematics Education. 2005.
http://www.erme.tu-dortmund.de/~erme/…​

de Corte, Eric, Brian Greer, and Lieven Verschaffel, eds. Making Sense of Word Problems. CRC Press, 2000. Pages 3-5.
https://books.google.com/books?id=OOy…​

Reusser, Kurt. “Problem solving beyond the logic of things: Contextual effects on understanding and solving word problems.” Instructional Science. 17.4 (1988): 309-338.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED…​

Benjamin Dickman Twitter and tweet
https://twitter.com/benjamindickman/s…​

Benjamin Dickman answer on Math Educators Stack Exchange
https://matheducators.stackexchange.c…​

Gene Wirchenko blog
http://genew.ca/solving-the-right-pro…​

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