When I was about 9 or 10, in what we call junior school in UK, my class was subject to an experimental new maths course for one term, which involved ‘playing’ with blocks of wood of different colours (think: like 3D bar chart bars) and of different lengths of a fixed multiple (a ‘1’ block was a small cube about 1/4 inch on a side, a ‘10’ block was, say, 1/4" x/1/4" x 2.5"). The point of these was that the course gave us a wide range of puzzles and challenges to solve, which were effectively training us to use these blocks to count in different bases. It helped that the blocks were colour-coded so each colour nominally represented a different base and in each base’s colour the longest rod was only as long as that base’s equivalent of ‘10’.
As a result I have always been comfortable with the concept of counting in a different base, and with the need to be able to convert between different measuring systems.
