Big Brainz Multiplication Blog

Multiplication worksheets are the most common way that schools measure math fact fluency, yet aggregating response times from so many different facts rarely tells you which ones a student is actually fluent with and which ones they are still calculating.

Here are a few tips for maximizing your effectiveness:

1. Assess each individual fact. You can use a stopwatch or let a program like Timez Attack do it for you automatically, but at some point it’s critical to measure which facts they can recall automatically and which ones they have to stop and calculate. If you don’t measure it accurately, you won’t fix it.

2. For your reference, fluent students generally recall AND input a 2-digit response in 1.9 seconds with a standard deviation of .6 seconds. Verbal responses would typically need just 1 second. A fluent student is automatic, but they are also confident. It’s empowering and motivational to KNOW the answer, so don’t shortchange students by settling for fumbled answers.

3. Report the results and do it as a letter grade. Few educators or parents will ignore a student that is clearly failing, yet the majority of students today currently have an “F” in fluency, yet they are promoted without a second thought because the shortcoming is only vaguely discovered and reported–if it’s discovered or reported at all.

4. If you have to use worksheets for assessment for some reason, at least do it in smaller chunks or lock down the average time. 2 seconds per fact will always be a fairly certain demonstration of fluency and 2.5 to 3 seconds per fact for 10 to 12 facts at a time will do a decent job. But if you gave an average student three minutes to answer 60 facts, they would answer the easy half in 1.5 to 2 seconds each, but then take 3 to 8 seconds to calculate others, giving only the illusion of fluency.

5. Don’t settle. Fluency is a core skill, yet the average student today plateaus in the 5th-grade with just 59% mastery–essentially the easy facts. Would you promote a student that had only learned 59% of the alphabet? Timez Attack delivers 95% fluency in a matter of hours, so there’s no need to handicap students for the rest of their math careers.

6. Finally, don’t assume that student fluency will magically improve “somehow” after they leave your class. Adopt the attitude, “If I send a student out the door with poor fluency, I’m likely ensuring they will struggle with math for the rest of their life.”

I’ll wrap up with some general advice. Learning multiplication is hard, so block out the time for it. But it’s also completely doable, so don’t let failure be an option. Timez Attack can knock it out easily for you in a matter of hours and can be absolutely free. No worries if you prefer a different way but whichever path you choose, make sure your students cross the finish line.

Lots of folks have kicked around the idea of iPads replacing textbooks or laptops in school classrooms, but I think both discussions are missing the real value of an iPad or tablet in a classroom—the input.  The key stumbling block for software instruction is input.  Humans are vastly better at understanding what children know and what they don’t know than computers are.  Humans can gauge student mastery by listening to what they say, by reading what they write, or simply by looking at the expression on their face.

Well, throw in a little voice-command, some handwriting recognition, and add a camera with “confusion detection” rather than “smile detection” and you’ve made digital education vastly more realistic.  A little too Buck Rogers?  Today, maybe.  But give it a few more years.

In the short-term, I’m most excited about the immediate benefits for math.  If a student does their math homework on an iPad, an awesome algebra app could follow along with HOW they’re solving the problem and show them exactly where in the process they may have messed up and instantly link them to the correction and instruction they need to keep working towards mastery.  I think iPads and tablets open the door for us to teach complex math subjects, like algebra, as effectively as games like Timez Attack teach multiplication.

What do you think—doable?

Multiplication games will save the world.  Well, not JUST multiplication games, but educational games in general.  Remember that scene from The Matrix where Trinity learns how to fly a helicopter in 5 seconds flat by using a perfect virtual simulator?  Well, it might take more than 5 seconds, but the technology for teaching people in such an immersive, effective environment already exists—we just don’t take advantage of it.

As a civilization, we’ll spend billions and billions to immerse kids in all kinds of unbelievably elaborate environments with no purpose whatsoever.  Just imagine what would happen if we invested a billion dollars into the world’s greatest math game instead of Grand Theft Auto.  Instead of accomplishing diddly-squat , we would have created a nation of kids who know math!  Millions of kids could be significantly smarter and more confident.  We have the technology.  We’re already spending the dollars.  We just need to redirect it into more beneficial products.

“Can’t be done,” some people will say.  Ridiculous.  We’ve already proved it can be done with our multiplication game, Timez Attack.  It takes time and effort, but obviously you can make an educational game just as engaging as an entertainment-only game if you really want to.  In fact, educational games can be even more entertaining because they include real achievement.  Think about it–as enjoyable as Madden NFL is, it’s still not as entertaining as the real thing.

Even if you don’t buy that argument, educational games have another built-in advantage.  The kids already HAVE  to learn this stuff.  They can either do it in a boring, painful, old-school way, or they can do it in a high-end, world-class video game.  The “shooting fish in a barrel” analogy comes to mind when you think about such an easy decision.

So what’s stopping us?  Well, there’s the “Edutainment” cynicism accumulated from a generation or two of pathetic educational software, parental apathy, the fragmented nature of the school system, and the decidedly low-tech culture at the huge educational publishing houses.  But in the end, it’s just dollars.  The gaming industry just needs to realize what a massive, untapped market educational games represent.  Once they realize what a gold mine they’re sitting on, we’ll finally see an educational revolution equal in scope to the industrial revolution.

It’s going to happen sooner or later.  Let’s get with the program and make it sooner.