Yes, James Tanton’s exploding dots are more or less a counting board turned into a pencil (or whiteboard marker) & eraser tool, with more focus on concepts than

Yes, James Tanton’s exploding dots are more or less a counting board turned into a pencil (or whiteboard marker) & eraser tool, with more focus on concepts than practical calculation. Personally I find moving counters around to be easier than drawing and erasing little dots. YMMMV. Having base ten arithmetic split into 5 × 2 (as was done historically) is convenient for practical use, but does slightly complicate the concept. Having a single number base as Tanton does makes explanations a bit simpler. It’s nice how Tanton shows that counting boards can be used with alternative rules to represent more advanced/abstract systems of calculation. We can make up counting boards for doing complex arithmetic, working in other number fields, working with formal polynomials, working with binary logic, ... Modern computer registers/memory aren’t much different than a (very large) counting board. When we combine a basic counting board with a human operator, we have a Turing-complete computing machine.