One thing that bothers me is that the author suggests that the decimal place value exercise is broken because all of the numbers are represented as the same siz

One thing that bothers me is that the author suggests that the decimal place value exercise is broken because all of the numbers are represented as the same size. The "representing numbers" exercise uses the 1-10-100 blocks that the poster alludes to using here, but I think the bigger issue is that in the real world, decimal quantities are not always sized proportionally to the value they represent. Money is a good example of this -- a US $100 bill is the same size as a US $1 bill and students need to be able to recognize the difference without seeing an object that's 100x bigger.