After launching a daily word search game, I randomly thought of this math game while driving. Finally got around to making it and I think it turned out pretty cool.
It’s a math search game that’s meant to help you practice your quick addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills.
I’m hoping it’ll help people (even those like me who aren’t big on math) learn and increase their speeds.
(There are also some settings you can enable to make the game harder)
If you try it out, please let me know if you found it fun, if you have anything you’d like me to add, or if you have any other feedback.
And if you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer. Much appreciated.
Would you want separate statistics for these "lives mode" games?
Quick test this am - looks like a small bug with the M.N. Counter for arithmetic in lives mode is getting to numbers that arent possible based on the combos available. First one works, second gets into 20s. I thought it might have just been a presentation issue but when i subtract the new MN from the previous one and input that it gives me a lost life!
gameTracker.timeLeft = 9999999999
My idea was that you could run a few rounds to practice certain operators and watch how your average scores improve over time. And since the rounds are only a minute, it's low commitment.
Going to add other modes though based on feedback
I encountered a couple of screens where there was no correct answer available; MN=2, and there were no 1s on the grid. I suspect my 6-year-old granddaughter would protest.
1. I think I only got one grid that was unsolveable.
2. That was my first grid.
3. I was only playing with addition.
4. I completed exactly one round.
Because the "unsolveable" grid was my very first, I may well have pressed on without investigating too much, because perhaps things would become clearer; and indeed, all subsequent grids were easy to solve.
So please don't treat my comment as a bug report! If you've taken trouble to avoid that outcome, then almost certainly the error is me.
Sorry the random generation seemed limited, I'll see what I can do. Right now it generates the grid numbers randomly just picking from 1-9, and the magic number is selected based on what's available on the grid.
Zen mode + lives mode are on the todos!
Adding some seconds to the clock for a correct answer is a cool idea. Will experiment with this one.
Thanks for your feedback!
Multiple game modes have been added as well.
If you notice any problems, please let me know!
Thanks for your feedback!
I think that's what parent meant.
Getting an error for pressing the addition button "2+" is a bit confusing.
Even knowing the instructions, I'm finding it very difficult not to press the operator tiles, as it just feels like a natural thing to do.
Love the game BTW, I'm getting my son on this tomorrow too, he'll love it :)
Being able to swipe over the equation instead of tapping would improve playability a lot! Also I sometimes feel like the first tap is not registered right after the new MN appears.
Will add swipe controls to my todos, I decided against adding it because the other word search games on the site will occasionally overflow off-screen (so swiping is required to move around the grid) but might add it as a toggle for this game.
Will look into the tap problem, thanks for reporting!
Otherwise, cool game!
Example:
1 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 9
Here you could use the left side to do 1 + 3 vertically.
For a larger grid to prevent misclicks, try going to settings and changing the "grid size" setting to a larger option.
Hope this helps! Thanks for playing.
One thing that I noticed is that there's a timer. Depending on your target audience, you might want to make that optional.
My son is 7 and finds the timer on Zetamac creates unnecessary stress. So I made something simpler for him that just shows a fixed number of problems (with no time limit), and uses a cookie to track the streak length: https://math.twilam.com/
Thanks for feedback on the timer, that seems to be common so I'm going to work on getting an alternative option out soon.
I also made a math game 3 years ago.
https://github.com/zineanteoh/clean-the-river
I called it “Clean the river”. It is a web-based game that lets children practice forming and solving basic mathematical expressions by "cleaning the river".
You could add in some elements that game uses to make it more appealing to kids.
1. Even on phones, it leaves a lot of margin/padding, and the boxes are a bit too small. Can you make it a bit more responsive and use up the whole width of the screen (up to a max width of course) 2. Only the first and the last needs to be selected, and so slide doesn't work. 3. A minor confusion in the UI, that I'm not sure if the equation can span across multiple lines?
For the sizing, try the grid size and counter text size options in the game settings. You can also change the grid dimensions to better fit your screen (or add some difficulty)!
Adding slide gestures is on the todos.
Also just shipped a fix to make multi-row selections impossible to make that more clear.
Thanks again
What a beautiful game, congrats!
Rainbow at the end is great!
What did you have in mind for a leveling up mechanic? Might be a cool idea.
Would you consider hosting this as mathic.worchle.com?
I'm hoping to build Worchle into a home for a variety of search-style games, so having the PWA open to the home page (which displays navigation links for all the puzzles currently on the site) has the benefit of helping those other puzzles (and the overall brand) get discovered.
It's a hard decision though as I do see the benefit of players being able to add specific games to their homescreen.
Another problem with separate manifests for games: since I'm using local storage for stats, multiple installs of different games on the site would also split up those stats. One install ensures all stats are kept together in a single homescreen bookmark.
Honestly though, I've been thinking about your comment for the past couple of days and I still don't know what the best decision is. It's a tough one.