CognoMath

Some games, when they appear, immediately become extremely popular. One example is Wordle ,  an online game that captured the internet in January 2022. What makes it so attractive? Dan Meyer asked his colleagues about the most inspiring aspects of the game, and shared their answers in a post . He concluded his post by suggesting that educational games should share these aspects too. Reading Dan’s post, I was excited to realize that our online games share most of these aspects! Let me use one of our games, Treasure Hunt, as an illustration. A simple question Learning the rules of Wordle takes practically no time: one has 6 attempts to guess a five-letter word. Each attempt must be a valid five-letter word. After each attempt the player gets instant feedback: which of the letters in the attempt belong to the target word and whether they are in the right spot. Learning how to play Treasure Hunt is easy as well: so far, every five year old who tried figured out how to play without an a...

  Imagine a student solving problems, one after another, each problem challenging enough to be interesting but not so challenging that the student is discouraged. The problems are sequenced carefully to enable the student to solve each of them.  Enjoying success again and again, the student learns to expect it, gets addicted to it, and is willing to work harder and longer to achieve it.  Being used to solving problems seems to be an important characteristic of successful learning. In the process described above, the student learns and practices problem solving strategies, both general and topic-specific. The student develops stamina and becomes resourceful. These are character traits that are useful—not only for learning mathematics, even not only for learning.  Of course, when we move from one imaginary student to a class of many real students we are faced with questions: Could a math problem, even “difficult enough but not too difficult,” be interesting for every s...

One year in my teaching experience stood out in shaping my professional priorities.  I was teaching math in a charter school. Entering sixth-graders at that school were given a math placement test and then grouped by achievement level into separate classes. That year I got to teach both groups of outliers: the class with the students who did best on the placement test and the lowest scorers’ class. It was such an interesting experience! Never before had I taught at the same time two groups of the same age that were so different academically!  Observing and analyzing the differences in these groups’ behavior changed how I saw the causes of success and failure. Let me tell you about these differences.  How students asked questions The striking difference I observed first was in their questions. My high achievers asked twice - no, ten times - as many questions as my low scorers. Both shy and outgoing kids asked them: the shy ones whispered; the others yelled their questions ...

Let me introduce ourselves: we, at CognoMath (formerly Math Worlds), are making a collection of online math games for kids.  When some time ago I started telling my friends (and actually everyone who was careless enough to ask what’s up) that I want to create such a collection, almost everyone asked: Yet another one? Have you seen already developed games? Are you sure something else is needed?  Of course there are many online math games and puzzles for kids, and I like many of them. But I do believe that we are making something different from all the games that are already there. For example, our games practically have no directions, building on kids’ natural curiosity and resourcefulness instead.   I am so happy that Anna and Eric share this belief to the extent of forming CognoMath with me.    In this blog, we are going to discuss games, kids, math games, math for kids, and everything in between that we might find interesting. We all look forward to ...