Make Times Tables Fun? Yes You Can!

I came across a retweet of a blog post (Great Maths Teaching Ideas) I saw over this past summer that explains a fun game for practicing those tricky times tables! It also reinforces addition, order of operations and mental math. This can easily be made into a fun game that can be used during math workshop or as a game the students can play when they are finished with their classwork and need something to do!

It's called Damault Dice and an explanation of the game can also be found here on Math 4 Love's blog.

It's simple, really -no bells, no whistles. All you need are 3 standard dice. On your turn, you simply roll the three dice, add two of the them together and then multiply that sum by the last di. Piece of cake!

For example, I roll a 3, a 4, and a 6. I could either do (3+4) x 6 for 42 points, OR (3+6) x 4 for 36 points, OR (4+6) x 3 for 30 points. I’ll take the 42 points.

I spent some time playing this with my stepdaughter the other day and I saw that (1) it was genuinely fun, and (2) it gives you almost all the multiplication practice you could ask for. In fact, it gives even more, because the choice of which dice to add and which to multiply reveals some interesting structure of numbers. Seriously, get a kid (and an adult) hooked on this game, and it’s the equivalent of dozens or hundreds of times table practice sheets.

A couple other variations that I came up with:

• Use different sided dice (like 12 sided) to make it more challenging!

• To go past multiplying by sixes (and up to 12s) use four dice, taking the sum of each pair then multiplying that together? If I roll a 3, 4, 5, and 6, I can do (3+4) x (5+6) OR 12 x 11; (3 +5) x (4+6) or 8 x 10, and so on.

• To make it more interactive, allow a steal option. If a person makes a mistake in their computation, the next person can do a steal if he or she has the right answer! This way all players must be paying attention and also this reinforces their math fluency!

Or if you come up with any other variations, please post them! Talk about making math fun!