This iPad Math Game Might Just Change Your Relationship to Screens
In Which I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the iPad
Kahoot! Big Numbers: DragonBox
Does This: Tricks your kids into begging to do hundreds of addition and subtraction problems a day
Is This: An addictive, stylish iPad and iPhone app based around gathering and trading resources like apples or candies.
Skip If: Your kids are already able to add and subtract 3 digit numbers and greater with ease.
Get Where: The App Store
Before March 2020, our toddler had never had the gentlest beam of blue light from a screen fall upon her brow.
After March 2020, we entered a plural marriage with The Walt Disney Corporation, Bobby Lopez & Kristen Anderson-Lopez, and the Apple iPad.
This wasn’t one of those feel-good, egalitarian plural marriages from speculative fiction like Holden’s parents in The Expanse.
No, the Mouse, Anna and Elsa’s creators, and the iPad the Dark Lord of Toddlers Everywhere were doing most of the co-parenting for our eldest while we both worked “full time” without the aid of childcare or preschool.
And not only did these scalable co-parents work for little pay and less recognition, I positively resented them for it.
I had read Matilda after all, and knew that at any moment screens could turn a kid into a tv-dinner-in-front-of-the-telly-zombie like Mike Wormwood. And so I sublimated my guilt into rage against the digital “distractions” themselves.
(Never mind that I myself had been raised in a house where the TV was practically never off (and yes, one of the ones depicted below was “dad”) and was not turning out to be 100% a lost soul.
This was in the golden age when each weekday you could watch not two but THREE back to back syndicated Simpsons episodes after school, mind you.
File under: Memes only 1980s latchkey kids of single moms will understand)
But then I was saved from my rut of dependence and resentment.
The helping hand came in the form of a text from my dear friend of more than twenty years. He is currently an academic economist and, as such, thinks in a very rigorous way about how to optimize.
Text message: Had I heard of the iPad game “Big Numbers”? His son loved it.
Now, you must understand that this esteemed microeconomist1 is an older, wiser tiger dad in my mind. Meaning: His eldest is 12 months or so older than my eldest, and so he does enrichment stuff what may as well be infinitely before I do.
Reader, I had not heard of Big Numbers. But when we popped, we could not stop. And in the process, we learned a few things:
Number 1: We’d been outrageously undershooting the expectations we had put on math learning for our four year old. (First pancake problem we fixed to some extent with our second pancake.)
Number 2: We could have a healthy relationship with the iPad! We could use it as a co-teacher, not a babysitter.
Instead of ashamedly catching a glimpse of our daughter staring Golem-like at videos of someone wordlessly gluing glitter paper on tiny furniture online to a vaporwave soundtrack, as the YouTube algorithm drew her deeper into the recesses of online subcultures we barely understood…
…we realized there was a whole world out there that she would actually love and learn a lot from.
Actual image of my children after they’ve been told they can finally take possession of their precious play Big Numbers
So Big Numbers is not a PERFECT perfect game, unlike some I’ll share with y’all in the future2. But it is a GREAT game, not least because it is a hall-of-famer from a kid’s enjoyment standpoint.
In a future post, I’ll do a dive on it for my real heads who want deep game mechanics and pedagogical analysis.
But for now, what you need to know is that it’s a great introduction to adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers. And your preschooler or early grades kid may well be able to go in cold (that is, perhaps not having done much addition or subtraction at all before).
Pluses: This game’s super power is that the game mechanics are much, MUCH more addicting than for the average addition and subtraction games and unusually pedagogically sound.
Minuses: YMMV, but I find there is still too much emphasis on the standard addition algorithm (you know the one). And the way they ask kids to repeat the algorithms does not make explicit enough the connections to the underlying math behind the algorithm. (Once you play it, come let’s vent together about the flashing square feature for the “carry the one.”)
YMMV: A big nonnegotiable element of the game is endless reps on number formation. On the one hand, it helped my three year old get great at writing numbers with virtually no effort on my part. On the other hand, it is a barrier in the early weeks with the game that might involve a parental time price tag that just can’t be paid right now. And for some kids, it might be a deal-breaker, because their cognitive skills are way far ahead of their fine motor.
I emphasize his profession for a few reasons. One, Cialdini’s theory of influence requires me to invoke authority whenever I can in my quest to get people to adopt this game. Second, if you know a microeconomist, you will perhaps appreciate why there is some poetry to his being the one to recommend this resource-gathering and trading app.