Maths games: finding fun ways to teach a challenging subject
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Maths is not a subject that comes easily for a lot of students. Some children click with it quickly, but in a lot of cases it can be a stressful, anxiety-inducing aspect of their school life. In many cases, stressful early experiences with maths can make the jobs of students’ future teachers more challenging as their confidence has already been rattled.
Finding ways to make maths skills applicable to the real world for children can make it more engaging, and even make it fun. Because the whole world, from the physical structure of the universe to everyday transactions is underpinned and determined by maths, it can be really easy to incorporate mathematical processes like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division into gamified learning experiences.
Reduce maths anxiety
Gamification is the application of game-like elements to make typically less playful subjects into a game. By making something difficult or stressful into play, like a challenging academic subject, you can bypass some of the elements students find more difficult by turning them into challenges within a learning game. You can change a student’s relationship with learning from being a pass or a fail into simply trying to play a video game – something many children will be very accustomed to.
The advantage of online maths games is that they can be customised to a student’s ability level and the relevant mathematical concept – be that addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, or even more advanced maths, like algebra. Online educational games can be played on any modern device, such as a tablet, or a smartphone, or a home computer, so they aren’t limited to the classroom. If the game engages the student, some of the negative associations they feel with the subject may be removed by the novel medium in which they are engaging with it. This is helped by the possibility of participating in maths activities in an environment they are more comfortable in, such as at home.
Use the repetitive nature of maths games to reinforce learning
Unlike most subjects, maths is not about learning dates and locations or places on a map. Mathematics is a skill, or more accurately, a set of skills, rules and formulas relating to the science of numbers. In the context of games, this means it’s not necessarily a subject that you exclusively revise, it’s a subject that you can practise. Whereas in the humanities or the sciences, a student could focus on the wrong subject or area of a topic in their revision and be penalised in an exam, in maths, a student is rewarded for being quick and confident at multiplication or long division. The repetitive nature of video games makes customising online gamified learning experiences around mathematics a really practical solution. On the Drimify platform, there are a number of online games that can be customised to help complement maths lessons, either in class or as homework.
A highly versatile option would be to utilise our Quiz to create maths word problems. The questions can take real world scenarios, but the student has to solve the embedded maths problem to get the answers. For example: Francis is on a train that travels at 50 miles per hour. How many miles will Francis have travelled after an hour and a half? The Quiz can take the form of multiple choice, open questions, or even ask them to order their answers. These can be applied to any aspect of maths, and be customised to any ability level, be that addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division, or even asking students to use multiple maths skills to answer the questions.
Another possible option on the Drimify platform for maths games is the Memory Game. Instead of using exact matches, you could ask students to match fractions with percentages or decimals, or use them in geometry to help them identify and recognise shapes. We also have 2048 available to customise. The 2048 game is a maths puzzle where players have to combine blocks to add up to 2,048, so could prove a fun and interactive addition to classwork or homework.
Combat dropout rates and future disengagement with a fresh and novel approach
Maths as a subject can’t be said to suffer from popularity among students. A-level and Highers classes are seldom struggling to accommodate the masses of budding young Ada Lovelaces and Leonhard Eulers beating down their doors. It’s a fair assumption that such an occurrence is a seldomly encountered logistical problem for secondary schools to have to solve.
What this might suggest is that more needs to be done to keep all students engaged and interested, not just the maths geniuses who will run the numbers on tomorrow’s space telescopes and rocket buses. By carefully appealing to the natural human desires for challenge and discovery, educational maths games can be incorporated into programmes of study as another medium through which to engage students in a difficult subject through play.
Collaborate with gamification experts to make sure your maths games add up
Educational games can take maths out of the textbook and apply it to the real world. Changing a student’s relationship with a challenging but important subject by making it a game could positively affect the course of their lives. If you wish to discuss how maths games could be incorporated into your classroom to help your students, get in touch to speak to our gamification experts about your project.
Changing work to play, and putting it in an online video game format can put students in a much more comfortable position from which to engage with different theories and processes, and allows them to practise in a pressure free environment, whether that’s on a device in the classroom, or on a device at home.
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