PersonalGames

Pyramath–the first fun math game I’ve seen in years.

 

I’ve posted about games and education before.  This is about an actual educational game – PyraMath by I See Cards.  This is a small collaboration of educators who designed, developed and produced a series of games for teaching math at the primary education level.  They were nice enough to send Gabrielle and I a copy to use when homeschooling Adam, and we both really like the game.

The premise is simple – starting with a played series of 7 cards, build a pyramid in one of two directions by playing a card that is the sum or difference of the two cards it is sitting on.  If you draw a card you can play, you can draw another card.  Play continues until you cannot play any more, and then you discard the drawn card and play passes to the other player.

The resident kindergartner and I played tonight as part of the evening school I do sometimes to keep in touch with his homeschool efforts.  Gabrielle does 99% of the work, and I like to stay in touch so I do the assessments, have him read to me and play games.

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Adam loved the game, and handled the math well.  Because you have to opportunity to play on the six and 9ninecard (for an example pair) until you draw a five or a three, you keep running the arithmetic over in your head.  “nine plus six is 15 and nine minus six is three but I have an eight so not there…” Adam is pretty good at arithmetic, thanks to Bakugan, but this was a very good repetitive resource, with a very visible ‘winning’ position.

If you have a primary schooler and need math drills, put away the flash cards and play PyraMath.  Also look at their other games, FracTazmic, Prime Bomb and I See Cards.  Much thanks to Linda for the demo copy – I’ll be buying more!

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