What a study of the historical development of mathematical concepts can offer teaching is still being debated. This study examines use of a combination of the historical development of number systems and modelling, with concrete materials as a way of deepening students’ understanding of positional notation. It looks at place value in different number bases as a way of enhancing students’ understanding of the decimal number system. The results suggest that the combination of a historical and a concrete approach helped the students to understand the place value system to the extent that they could generalise it to other bases.