[imtringued]

Yeah come on. Just tell the kids that you are taking the dot product of every row vector in A and every column vector in B. The weirdness comes from the fact that nobody ever told them that you can write the dot product as the multiplication of a transposed vector aka a row vector and a column vector as in a^Tb = <a,b>.

Someone who is being told to multiply this entry with that entry will get confused if they don't have the high level overview. They will miss the forest for the trees.

[moi2388]

Yes. So I tell them that, and as purely visual trick to remember what it means I tell them to just rotate it by 90 degrees and they can see what to add if they get confused.

It’s the same as with the unit circle. I teach them about pi, but also speak about Tau in case they get confused, so it makes more visual sense to them.

Same with small kids when a/b=c. I draw little arrows to show them how you can rewrite it, as purely visual trick.

Oh well, what works for one might not work for another i suppose.