We're sorry, but in order to take the video tour, you will need to upgrade your Flash Player by clicking here.
Welcome to the MathFactsPro.com virtual tour. MathFactsPro is a free online Flash game that is actually a research based computer program to help math teachers with struggling students. The research shows that by memorizing the basic math facts, working memory is freed up and that helps with problem solving and learning, of course. Unlike most games, though, which emphasize correct answers or overall speed, Math Facts Pro's emphasis is memorization, so it distinguishes between facts a student instantly recalls, and facts they got right, say, using their fingers. At the end, you're going to get a report that looks like this for George. George knows 47 facts. He has them memorized. It will tell him which facts he needs to work on next to make his studying efficient. If you have George print off the report every time he beats his record for memorized facts, you can see his progress, like this, as he gets better and better, and then as he knows them all.
Math Facts Pro teaches all the facts for all the operators. For multiplication and division, students need to select if they are going up through the 10's or the 12's, and type in their name for the report at the end. If they set a high score it remembers their first name for 24 hours and then it dumps it. Names aren't stored any longer than that. We're using video jokes, kind of a YouTube style, instead of a first person shooter or arcade games. 6th graders have a completely different sense of humor than kindergarteners, so students select their grade to make it more fun, or just turn off the jokes. Math Facts Pro is an intelligent tutor and it is dynamically adjusting the problem difficulty as it seeks to figure out which facts each student needs to be working on. So selecting approximately how many facts they know at the beginning makes the game more efficient. A lot of times teachers will assign ten minutes of studying math fact flashcards a night, but we know that a lot of times students aren't using the cards, or they aren't on the right cards, or they lose their cards. To avoid that, Math Facts Pro focuses on the number of facts correct, so you set how many that you are going to get correct, and it goes that long, or it can go unlimited. Best practice would be to practice 100 facts during school and 100 facts after school. It takes about 5 – 7 minutes each time to do that. Now we're off to the game. You will notice that if I select a wrong answer it only shows the correct answer. That is to help visual learners that might remember seeing the incorrect answers. Math Facts Pro never shows a wrong answer. I should probably start getting them right. Also, faster students can count on their fingers more quickly than slower students can recall a memorized answer, so the game is periodically going to ask them really easy facts in order to gage how fast each user can instantly recall an answer, which is a different speed for each user's brain. The interface is designed to help teachers monitor what's going on from across the room. You can see the name in bold across the top of the screen, and also the color of the interface changes for each operator, so you can see that they are playing the right game.
When the number of facts they selected is up, or if they know all the facts, or if they just come on up and select the results button, they get the results page. The report is designed for printing. It's mainly a black and white report because it's probably going to be printed on laser printers a lot, and it uses light grays and whites in order to save on toner. I would suggest you have students print off the report mainly just when they set a new personal best for number of facts memorized. Or, if you are wanting to have them prove that they did their homework at night, you can have them print off the page, because it shows them how many facts they did correct, and the date and the time as well.
If you have any questions, suggestions, or comments, we would love to hear from you. On the website there's a link on the bottom to the contact us page with a little form that you can use to communicate with us. We would just love to hear what you're thinking. We're hoping that Math Facts Pro will make your teaching job a lot easier, as you shift more of your effort into higher level learning and let Math Facts Pro handle the repetition and the memorization of the basic math facts. And of course, this will make students' learning a lot more fun also. Thank you for listening to the video tour. I hope you have a great day.
updated: December 16, 2011