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Show HN: I made a web game that makes practicing basic arithmetic fun

by dylanhouli on 6/9/24, 12:04 PM with 80 comments

• by mysterydip on 6/9/24, 4:22 PM

  I want to share this with my daughter who needs some practice with these, but the timer just causes anxiety. Could you add a mode with unlimited time but three "lives"?

• by rahimnathwani on 6/9/24, 4:21 PM

  This is cool. When it's in 'all operators' mode it's challenging!

  One thing that I noticed is that there's a timer. Depending on your target audience, you might want to make that optional.

  My son is 7 and finds the timer on Zetamac creates unnecessary stress. So I made something simpler for him that just shows a fixed number of problems (with no time limit), and uses a cookie to track the streak length: https://math.twilam.com/

• by zi_ on 6/9/24, 5:43 PM

  Love this!

  I also made a math game 3 years ago.

  https://github.com/zineanteoh/clean-the-river

  I called it “Clean the river”. It is a web-based game that lets children practice forming and solving basic mathematical expressions by "cleaning the river".

• by ModernMech on 6/9/24, 5:33 PM

  Reminds me of Number Munchers: https://classicreload.com/number-munchers.html#

  You could add in some elements that game uses to make it more appealing to kids.

• by acl on 6/9/24, 4:37 PM

  Neat! I played for a while with my 10yo son. The timer is a bit of a drag. My suggestion is to either implement a lives mechanism like the other poster suggested, or to make the timer reset after each success.

• by Rebellos on 6/9/24, 9:31 PM

  Amazing little game, thank you!

  Being able to swipe over the equation instead of tapping would improve playability a lot! Also I sometimes feel like the first tap is not registered right after the new MN appears.

• by jayaprabhakar on 6/10/24, 4:23 AM

  This looks cool. The UI animation is good. Looking forward for more such games. A few minor feedbacks.

  1. Even on phones, it leaves a lot of margin/padding, and the boxes are a bit too small. Can you make it a bit more responsive and use up the whole width of the screen (up to a max width of course) 2. Only the first and the last needs to be selected, and so slide doesn't work. 3. A minor confusion in the UI, that I'm not sure if the equation can span across multiple lines?

• by LeChuck on 6/9/24, 7:20 PM

  Very nice, love it. I play the chess version of this pretty often. You might like to take a look at Lichess’ Puzzle Storm (and Puzzle Streak/Puzzle Race) for some inspiration on other game modes.

  https://lichess.org/storm

• by le-mark on 6/9/24, 8:38 PM

  Feature request; my third grader needed to work on certain numbers like 3’s and 9’s, also the random number generation seemed limited when I played. Also agree zen mode is needed. Also how about adding n seconds when a correct answer is entered?

• by mariocesar on 6/9/24, 6:12 PM

  I have a premonition that within three months, someone (a newspaper) will purchase this beautiful game to add ads or offer subscriptions. Then, thousands of copycats will appear, and finally, there will be an open-source version.

  What a beautiful game, congrats!

• by fuzzythinker on 6/9/24, 5:48 PM

  You have to account for fat fingers on mobile. Twice have I pressed the 4th square instead of the 3rd, and I don't even have "fat" fingers. Just remove the ending squares if they are operators.

• by boringg on 6/10/24, 9:59 PM

  Great app! We were playing with the two little ones though we needed more time. I saw a comment in the thread with a combo of zen mode, lives (eg mistakes) and maybe a level up mechanism?

  Rainbow at the end is great!

• by Mathnerd314 on 6/9/24, 7:51 PM

  Reminds me of the venerable https://arithmetic.zetamac.com/ (disclosure: I know the author)

• by abbadadda on 6/9/24, 6:22 PM

  Cool game. “7 +” is the start of a valid equation so making it error out can be confusing for 7 year olds that you need to “jump” over the operator. Great otherwise!

• by denton-scratch on 6/9/24, 4:18 PM

  Nice.

  I encountered a couple of screens where there was no correct answer available; MN=2, and there were no 1s on the grid. I suspect my 6-year-old granddaughter would protest.

• by EPmoL on 6/10/24, 2:02 AM

  On iOS the “Add to Home Screen” strips the /mathic/ so the link ends up opening the word game instead.

  Would you consider hosting this as mathic.worchle.com?

• by ximeng on 6/9/24, 10:16 PM

  Slightly confusing rounding to 2dp. E.g. 1/8 displays as 0.13. Maybe show another decimal or display target as fraction.

• by rnicholus on 6/9/24, 3:37 PM

  This is pretty cool. My 6 year old is into word searches and math, so this seems like it will be a fun game for him.

• by Sandworm5639 on 6/9/24, 5:09 PM

  You can choose a diagonal segment but it doesn't count even if the concatenated digits give the M.N.

• by leke on 6/9/24, 3:20 PM

  That's a fantastic concept. I did pretty badly so it looks like I need to practice more.

• by doublerabbit on 6/9/24, 3:40 PM

  Fun, great concept.

  Getting an error for pressing the addition button "2+" is a bit confusing.

• by upmostly on 6/9/24, 6:37 PM

  I tapped a number, then an operator and was told it wasn't valid. Wordle and other games let you tap each tile to build up your answer.