Kids Math Games

The great thing about a math game is that it tickles your gray cells to no end. It is thus no wonder that math games have been the rage throughout the ages fascinating both kids and grown-ups.

Maths games range from the very simple that are actually child’s play to the immensely complex that have remained unsolved through the ages. Scholars have labored over many a game of math, resulting in theoretical developments in the realm of mathematics.

Gracing the Hall of Fame of legendary maths games are the ones invented by the ancient Greek mathematicians, the most famous among them being Archimedes’ Cattle Problem. The sheer complexity of this game can be gauged by the fact that some of its solutions turn out to be numbers with 206545 digits.

The Rabbit Problem is another ‘who’s who’ of math games. And wizards and laymen have raked their brains trying to figure out how many pairs of rabbits can be produced in a year from another pair of rabbits if every month each pair begins a new pair which from the second month on becomes productive?

It was not only Jacques Saunier, of The Da Vinci Code fame, who was fascinated by the Fibonacci Sequence. The sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... where each number is the sum of the preceding two has mesmerized mathematicians enough to have a whole body of mathematics dedicated to it.

Then there is the Kirkman's School Girl Problem that assumes a towering importance in the modern theory of combinatorics. The game is all about figuring out how 15 girls can walk in 5 rows of 3 each for 7 days so that no girl walks with any other girl in the same triplet more than once.

Some famous chessboard problems involving the use of mathematics are the Eight Queens game where you have to arrange eight queens on a chess board so that no two can attack each other and of course the ancient Arabian game on grains of wheat, 1 on the first square of the chess board, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on.

These mathematics games are not mere food for thought. They constitute important educational tools to guide your kid through the basics of mathematics. Children learn best when they can derive some fun out of the teaching.

In fact, this is the credo of the numerous online sites that offer free tutoring on mathematics. These sites are replete with maths games of all kinds and different difficulty levels. These games aim to impart the logic behind maths through fun and frolic. In fact, the idea has caught on like wild fire and these days it is not uncommon to find a tutor attempting to teach the kids the basics of group theory with the Rubik Cube.

You can also devise simple math games for your kid to have fun with. Something as simple as asking him to get three cookies from the jar or counting the number of kittens will help him with his counting. Board games are fun ways to brush up your kid’s sequential math understanding. You can even ask your kids to keep scores of the games so that he gets his addition fundamentals spot on.

When it comes to learning maths, the math game is a great one for mixing business with pleasure.