Online game to master multiplication?
Hi—My kid is going into fourth grade but hasn’t mastered her times tables. We’re doing daily practice, but I’ll bet she’d be motivated to do a ton more reps if I handed my phone over to her for 20 minutes a day to play a game, in addition. I’ve found some apps that basically run flash cards, but there’s no gamification there. Anyone have advice: fun games with multiplication/division as a driver to advance? Thank you! Good luck to all this summer. :)
Jun 18, 2023
Parent Replies
Yatzee is a fun game for the whole family. It only uses five dice but it's a start. We also used old fashioned flash cards. We would go through the cards and set aside the ones that were difficult for a second review. Once through the entire deck and once through the harder ones. That was it. Not too much of a time commitment. And LOTS of commiseration that memorizing your mutliplication and division tables was boring but EVERYONE has to do it. Eventually you have a day when there's nothing in the stack to review!
I used to play Number Munchers all the time in elementary school back in the late '90s. It was my second favorite after Oregon Trail. It looks like they have an Apple app now. Or you might be able to find an online version.
Duolingo has a math app that uses the same game design and education research as the language app. I have not used the math version, but DuoLingo has helped me with French for the past year. I found it more fun and engaging than previous attempts to learn the language. I’d start there for your math student.
Hi- elementary math specialist here. Please check out this deck of visual multiplication cards. The visual representations are very effective at helping children comprehend multiplication, not just memorize by rote. I’ve used these with many kids and they work! Most multiplication “games” online are based on quick recall of facts with a timer, and the speed aspect stresses kids out. “Math for Love Multiplication by Heart Visual Flash Cards”- you can buy the deck on Amazon. Watch the video first to learn how to use them.
https://www.amazon.com/ive?ingressType=dpimageblock&egress=asvh&product…
As a kid I played Number Munchers on the computer to reinforce multiplication. It isn't times tables, per se, but instead it focuses on multiples.
The favorite in our household is Math Makers: Fun Math For Kids. It's a subscription but the same company has a couple of standalone pay-once games. It's cute, there's no irritating voice acting, it's gotten new content fairly regularly, and it emphasizes problem solving using multiplication (and addition and subtraction). I like it a lot! That said, it doesn't really do math drills.
We paid for a MathTango subscription for a while, and the multiplication/division half has much more emphasis on memorizing the tables, which sounds like what you want. But as a game, I found it predatory-adjacent -- lots more flashing lights and achievement gimmicks to keep kids playing. It was an effective memorization tool but was a battle to get my kid to turn it off.
If cartoons are an option, the final two seasons of Numberblocks are all about multiplication, division, and prime/square numbers, with some very effective earworm songs. Might be too babyish for a fourth-grader but all the episodes are five minutes long, so it might be worth a shot.
Check out Prodigy! My kiddo just finished fourth grade and this was one of the games/apps available in his class to reinforce math concepts. There is definitely a gamification element. https://www.prodigygame.com/