Children’s math skills aided by number board games: study

Sitting down with your young children to play number-based board games, such as parachutes and ladders, can help improve their math skills, suggests a recent review of nearly 20 studies over more than two decades.

A study published July 6 in the peer-reviewed journal Early years looked at 19 studies from 2000 and at children between the ages of three and nine. All but one study looked at the relationship between board games and math skills, the researchers said.

Some of the games used in the studies were well-known games such as dominoes, as well as parachutes and ladders.

They found that these types of games helped children with math skills such as counting and addition.

“Board games improve young children’s math skills,” Jaime Balladares of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, Chile, who served as the study’s lead author, said in a press release.

“The use of board games can be viewed as a strategy with potential effects on basic and complex math skills. Board games can be easily adapted to incorporate learning objectives related to math skills or other domains.”

The researchers say that since kindergartens rarely use board games, the study focused on looking at all the available evidence about the effect these games have on children.

“While board games can improve understanding of knowledge, improve player interactions, and increase children’s participation and motivation, there is limited evidence from scientific evaluations to estimate the magnitude of the effects of using games versus traditional education” , the study said.

The researchers say that all of the children enrolled in the reviewed studies had board game sessions on average twice a week with an adult supervisor, such as a teacher, therapist or parent, lasting 20 minutes for a month and a half.

Some studies had children play a board game with numbers, while the rest played a game that didn’t focus on numbers. In other studies, all participants played different types of number-based board games.

In the studies, each child’s math skills were measured before and after the sessions for skills such as naming numbers, determining if one number is greater than another, and addition and subtraction.

Children’s math skills improved “significantly” on 52 percent of these tasks after a session, the researchers said, while 32 percent of participants who played a number-based game achieved better results than those who did not participate.

“Future studies should be designed to explore the effects these games could have on other cognitive and developmental skills,” Balladares said.

“An interesting space for the development of board game intervention and assessment should open up in the coming years, given the complexity of games and the need to design more and better games for educational purposes.”