Math Man
Eat the ghost with the right answer.
Grades 3-5 · Multiplication facts, arcade style
How to play
- 1A problem shows at the top, like 6 × 7.
- 2Move around the grid with the arrow keys or the pad.
- 3Eat the ghost carrying the correct answer. The ghosts move too, so chase yours down.
- 4Eating the wrong ghost costs a life. Three lives.
Try a few
7 x 8
Answer: 56
Split the awkward factor. Break the 8 into 5 and 3, because sevens times five is easy: 35. Seven threes is 21. Put them back together and you get 56. Split whichever factor leaves you with a five.
4 x 8
Answer: 32
Count the eights: eight, sixteen, twenty four, thirty two. Four of them, so 32. Beware of 28, which is a real product but of 4 x 7, one group short. That is the ghost most often eaten by mistake.
8 x 8
Answer: 64
Halve and double. Cut one 8 into 4 and 4: eight fours is 32, and the other four eights is 32 again, so 64 together. Watch for a ghost carrying 63, which is a real product, of 7 x 9, and close enough to 64 to share the board with it.
Why this game helps
This is the arcade classic turned into fact practice: instead of eating any ghost, you have to eat the one carrying the right answer, which means solving the fact and then hunting the number across a moving board. Reading four numbers and picking the one that matches, over and over, is exactly the quick recall that makes multiplication useful, and doing it while the target wanders keeps a child engaged far longer than a worksheet of the same facts would. Like the other speed games, it is for facts already understood; the chase is what turns known into instant.
If your child finds this hard
The wrong ghost a child eats is usually a real fact, just the wrong one. Asked for 4 x 8 they take 32 or 28 more or less at random, because 28 is 4 x 7 and both feel like they belong to the fours. The same vagueness produces 34 for 9 x 4, a number that is not a product at all but sits close enough to pass. The child has a rough neighbourhood for the answer rather than the answer, and the ghosts carry numbers within five of the right one, so the neighbourhood is exactly where the traps are.
The fix is to make the fact arrive before the chase starts. Ask your child to say the answer out loud while standing still, then go and get it. Working the product out and then comparing it with the tempting neighbour is what separates the two facts in memory; hunting first blurs them further.
When the whole row is vague rather than one fact, the chase is the wrong tool. Skip Counting turns sixes and sevens into a chant a child can run through in a couple of seconds, and a chant is a real fallback in a game with no timer.
Common questions
- Is there a time limit?
- No, which makes this the gentlest of the arcade games here. The ghosts wander about once a second but they never step onto you, so nothing can happen while your child thinks. A life is lost only by eating the wrong ghost, which is always a move the player made.
- Which times tables does it use?
- Everything from 2 x 2 up to 9 x 9 in both orders, which is 64 combinations, or 36 distinct facts once turn-arounds count as one. There are no 1s, 10s, 11s or 12s, so the pool is the part of the table that actually needs practice.
- Does the chasing distract from the math?
- Partly, and that is the trade the game makes on purpose. The maze is what gets a child through forty facts instead of eight, at the cost of some attention going on navigation. For facts already understood that is worth it; for facts being learned it is not.
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