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Ten seconds of math

mental-math-trainer.com

41–50 of 123 posts

Re: Ten seconds of math

#41

I've played with many of these. And this one is pretty good. One thing that I'd like to see is a "verbal" option in these types of apps. I have trouble "hearing" math and keeping it in my head. I envision an app speaking the problem, then you have to type in the answer. It requires both math and keeping the problem in your head. Lastly, a verbal or speaking option maps to many real world scenarios.

>I have trouble "hearing" math and keeping it in my head.

I have the exact same problem. Interestingly, it's a problem for me both in my native language and in several other languages I learned to fluency. So clearly, the "hears numbers" part of my brain is deficient.

I've actually practiced to try to overcome this, and made no progress.

On the other hand, I'm quite good at visual calculations, and also at remembering numbers when I see them. So if I bother writing down a phone number, I can easily remember it for a long time.

But hearing it? Nothing.

Re: Ten seconds of math

#42
It's boring at some point. You should make a countdown instead: you have, say, 1 minute to answer as much questions as you can (with an possible skip button).

Re: Ten seconds of math

#44

Nice! I made something similar a while ago - http://www.speedsums.com :)

I like how it remembers your worst answer and reminds you what's the correct answer! The victory animation was a bit terrifying though, like one of those "stare at the screen" pranks :) Cheers

Re: Ten seconds of math

#45
I got redirected to the Google Play store. If I'm on Android why can't I use the website like everyone else? Please don't assume I want to install an app.

Re: Ten seconds of math

#46
post #21

This is pretty cool but, is it a game? I can't see how solving math problems under a time limit can be useful for anything besides a math exam or some other academic test.

This is just a slightly-gamified version of mental arithmetic training flashcards. Are you questioning why mental arithmetic is useful? There are lots of places where it can improve your ability to understand the information around you.

If you're reading a graph, you should be asking yourself a ton of questions about it. A lot of those questions can be answered with mental math if you're proficient at it. If you weren't, you'd have to resort to a calculator or other tool, and the switching cost keeps most people from doing this:

examples: what's the ratio between these two values? How did it change? I have this per minute (or, in my case, a per 4 minutes) rate. What is that per day? How much did that drop by (absolute and relative)

The point isn't that people who are bad at math can't compute these things in the real world. They can, and often do, whether with calculator, on paper, slower in their brains, or with a different query or better analysis tool. But people who do these operations quickly mentally do it more, do it more quickly, and can digest and filter more numeric information.

Re: Ten seconds of math

#47
post #45

I got redirected to the Google Play store. If I'm on Android why can't I use the website like everyone else? Please don't assume I want to install an app.

I also got redirected... I'm on Windows Phone.

Re: Ten seconds of math

#48
"You scored: 315. You are better than 100%". Why do I think their countdown timer needs some work on MobileSafari? :)

Re: Ten seconds of math

#49

It'd be pretty cool if this actually had leaderboards, perhaps one leaderboard per set of options, limited to clusters so as to minimize the amount of leaderboards. Such as "arithmetic, multiplication+division, arithmetic and mutliplication+division, free for all" Was pretty upset to see that the result for scoring 5xx was the same as my next run of 7920

A leaderboard wouldn't be meaningful -- Client-side code isn't secure, and people could set scores to whatever they like. Or, just for fun, I played with the page a bit via dev tools, added in a script to automatically calculate the answer, put it in the input, and trigger the keyup event to run their submit function... worked great.

There is nothing wrong with client-side tools. I have a few on my site that get decent usage. But unless you put some security and validation on the server-side, any data coming back is not trustworthy.

Re: Ten seconds of math

#50
post #42

It's boring at some point. You should make a countdown instead: you have, say, 1 minute to answer as much questions as you can (with an possible skip button).

At first I actually thought that's what the game would be. I was pleasantly surprised that it was more like juggling, by the end when I had 1-2 seconds per problem, I was far more interested. Something about keeping up the "combo" but testing my arithmetic was quite pleasurable.
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