Educational Math Games
I did a Yahoo search (I don’t usually use Google, which I think puts me in a small percentage of the population. I don’t have a gmail account either but maybe that is the topic of another blog…) on “educational math games.”
The first website that is listed is mathplayground.org, so I checked it out. It’s not a great website aesthetically – I doubt a graphic designer was involved, but it’s easy enough to navigate. Immediately, I tried out the Percent Shopping game. The premise of level 1 is that the player is a customer at a store and must calculate the savings of a 10%/35%/60%! off sale. While I had expected to be presented with one item at a time, the game is actually more interactive. The first step was to choose five items off the shelves, which was pretty cool. I chose things that I would actually consider buying (a soccer ball, checkerboard, a radio, a bike, and a drum) in real life. I bet most students would do the same thing. Once the items were selected, the game requested the total amount of the items before the sale, the amount of the discount, and the total amount including the applied discount. The prices of the items seem to be given arbitrarily and are not necessarily realistic, which is somewhat unfortunate, but the concept is more important. If a student gets stuck, there’s a “Learn How” button which explains the process for finding the answers. Also on the Math Playground website is a game that emulates the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? game show on TV called Math Millionaire. It even has four lifelines. Of course, the website won’t actually award $1,000,000 to game winners, but it’s still a fun game.
Overall, there aren’t a lot of options on the Math Playground website, but the games that are there are put together well and I think would be pretty effective for students (”Concepts include basic math operations, algebra, percent, geometry, and money.”).
The second website that showed up in my search was the FunBrain site. However, this site requires registration, which I didn’t feel like dealing with. However, the site is colorful and looks fun; it certainly has a more cohesive design than the previous website. Also, the games can be searched by grade or concept.
Using Google, I came across Cool Math 4 Kids. I found the site to be hard on my eyes (bright colors over a black background), but otherwise it looked to be well laid-out (I decided later that it wasn’t so much). This site has been bookmarked by over 1000 Delicious users. Still, it’s not that incredible. I couldn’t understand how the Mouse Trap game was pertinent to math. Math Man, a knock-off of Ms. PacMan, can be challenging (solving an equation while trying to simultaneously dodge the monsters), I don’t think it’s stimulating enough to be that useful. I tried several of the other games, but I didn’t find any to be spectacular. As a teacher, I might recommend this site for students to investigate outside of school but I wouldn’t take them to the computer lab to use up class time with it.
