This quintessential book about number bases is an out-of-this world encounter with mathematics of a different kind. Go shopping through an intergalactic mall, ride on a subterranean hover module, converse with creatures who know your every thought, and eat exotic food at an alien restaurant (if you can keep it from crawling away).

While saving the planet from destruction, students will become fluent in base 6, base 2, and base 16 (the computer bases) numbers, while gaining a deeper understanding of our own base 10 number system.

This book is an easy-to-follow guide for learning to count, as well as add, subtract, and multiply, in other base number systems with a step-by-step answer key. Best-selling Prufrock author Marya Washington Tyler joins forces with statistician Rita Berg, and 12-year-old prodigy Nick Bollow, to create the ultimate instruction book about number bases. With its humor, cartoon drawings, and clearly understandable language, your students will forget they are tackling complex mathematics. If you love math, you’ll really love Alien Math!

Other math books by Marya Washington Tyler include: It's Alive!, It's Alive! And Kicking!, Extreme Math, and Real Life Math Mysteries.

Grades 5–8

This book was very well received by the students in our math enrichment program. The students found it very engaging and challenging, and I would highly recommend it. I used it was advanced 5th graders, but it could probably be appropriate for advanced 4th through 8th grades.