I will have no idea whether it made much difference, but when my niece was in 3rd grade and visiting I was planning to make a new pieced quilt, and she came over to watch as I sat at the dining room table with paper and pencil. I had a full-sized sketch of the block, so she took a ruler and measured each piece. Then she counted how many of each size and shape and color were in each block. By that time she was really interested, so I told her I could use her help figuring everything out and handed her a pencil and 2 pads of paper -- one to make our shopping list and one for all the math. Then I told her there were going to be 81 blocks in the quilt, so together we did the multiplication to get the totals of all the pieces we would need. When we had all that written down I told her we could go to the store and choose the fabric, but we needed to know how much fabric to buy
--- we needed to get enough for all the pieces, but would buy extra "just because quilters always do that" since quilters make mistakes and would use extra fabrics for something else later on. So -- then came the "how many 2" squares can fit across the fabric", and I told her about seam allowances, and she was afraid she would have to figure all of that, too, and essentially start over, but I told her we would just put the 2" squares on the fabric with 1/2" all the way around so each would have the 1/4" seam allowances automatically added, and that we would do that with the 1" squares and the 2" HST's, too. And I showed her the stencils I use to mark the fabric, which have the "holes" for the pieces cut out and spaced 1/2" apart -- she thought that would help. So, I told her that the fabric we would get was 44" wide, but we would only figure on having 42" and showed her what selvages were, and she used the 42" width to figure the "how many across". Then came the "how many rows do we need" -- more basic math. When that was figured for each shape and color, we could figure how many yards of fabric we really needed, and then added plenty of extra "just because". (Meanwhile, I was figuring all that out myself, of course, hoping that our sets of figures would come out the same so we could use her list in the store.) When she thought we had it all figured, I told her we also needed more of the blue fabric to bind the quilt, so she decided we needed to know how far it was all the way around the quilt and how wide the binding would be, used the 42", and figured that, too, with very little guidance by that time -- I just told her we also needed extra length because of the corners. Next came what we would need to get for the backing, so she figured that. I told her we didn't need to buy batting since I already had plenty of that, and thread, too. And then we went shopping, and celebrated our purchases with lunch at her favorite fastfood restaurant. She was pretty excited. The next day we began marking the fabrics, and as I did the cutting she counted out the pieces for each block for the quilt and put each "block" in separate piles and then into separate envelopes all ready to stitch. She and her mother had to leave for home a few days later, but late one evening I took the extra fabric and cut out 2 extra blocks. She called me several times about the quilt -- how did the blocks look, how many had I sewn, etc. Meanwhile, I pieced the 2 extra blocks, quilted and bound them, added a zipper and a pillow form, and sent her a "thank you for all your good help" surprise. She is now 34 years old and still has that pillow! She teaches 5th grade in Colorado, and last year took that pillow to school with her and explained how she had helped with a big quilt when they were talking about why math is important in everyday life -- how many gallons of paint for a house, how much grass seed for a new yard, how many tomato plants for how many tomatoes for spaghetti sauce, how much gas for a particular car to drive to California, etc.