With the ferocious rise in technology over the past few decades, never has it been more important to encourage kids to develop number, reasoning, pattern recognition, and other math skills. Faced with this truth, parents often wonder if they’re doing enough to prepare their children. Can playing a few online math games or board games like Hi Ho Cherry-o really boost math skills later in life?
Fortunately, scientists have tested the theory, and they’ve got our backs.
Approximate Number Sense (ANS)
Psychologists have known for years that most infants are born with an innate ability to guesstimate relative amounts without counting, called ANS. In other words, given two piles of blocks, young children will instinctively know which pile has more blocks in it. Yet psychologists also wondered how that innate knowledge related to the child’s future mathematical skills.
So they tested ANS in about 100 first graders in the Boston area. The children played games that involved guesstimating which gatherings of dots were larger, done in increasingly more complicated ways. When the children were done with the games, they were given a set of math tests. The results were so striking that the psychologists reported them to the journal Cognition.
It turns out that playing with numbers and groupings and patterns leads to much better math performance, in some cases by 25%.
Number Line Benefits
The study out of Cognition is not the only one that tested what kind of number games can boost math skills later in life.
In 2011, a study showed that children who had a good “number line” sense—that is, the ability to understand how much a certain number represents—performed better on math tests all the way through middle school.
Strengthening the number line could be as simple as playing Sorry, where the child flips a card, notes the number, then moves a token across a board, counting all the way. The process “encodes” in the child’s brain an intuitive sense of number and value.
So, parents, take heed. Number and board games are not just lovely distractions from a busy day. They’re also preparing your child to be the next technological whiz-kid.
