Difficulty
Addition only. Small numbers 1–5 to get used to "how many altogether." With dots.
Press "Start" and an addition or subtraction problem appears. Turn on "Show dots" to count with your eyes. Tap the answer from three numbers! 10 questions in all.
To a five or six year old, 7 is still a symbol rather than a quantity. Seeing the digit does not automatically bring seven things to mind. So Kids Math puts dots alongside the equation.
Addition shows blue dots and orange dots joined by a plus sign, so it is visible where the first number ends and the second begins. Subtraction lays out the starting number and crosses off the ones being taken away. Leaving the crossed-out dots in place matters: it shows subtraction as counting what remains rather than as things disappearing.
Pointing at the dots and counting them out loud is entirely fine. Early on, touching the screen one dot at a time is the version that sticks.
Each question offers three numbers, and the two wrong ones are drawn from within ±1 to ±3 of the correct answer. Distant random numbers are avoided because they can be eliminated on sight, letting a child score without doing any arithmetic.
Keeping the options close means a miscount shows up as being one off. Hesitating between 6 and 7 is exactly the kind of hesitation this stage should produce.
When the answer is 0 or 1 there is no room below it, so the gap is filled from above. Every question still offers three choices.
Pick the wrong number and that button fades out and stops responding, with a short sound. That is all. The correct answer is not revealed, and the same question stays up so the remaining choices can be tried.
Withholding the answer is the point: the moment right after a mistake is the best moment to recount. Showing the answer there lets a child skip the recount and move on.
The score does distinguish the two, though. Only questions answered correctly on the first try count, so the number at the end of ten questions reflects how many came without hesitation. Not scoring ten out of ten is fine as long as they counted their way through.
Every level stays within single-digit arithmetic. There is no multiplication and no column addition — the range is kept to what a preschooler can finish and feel done with.
Dots start on for Easy and Normal and off for Hard, on the assumption that a child choosing Hard should be answering without counting. Either way the toggle is available mid-game.
Pressing "Hide dots" leaves just the equation and three numbers, which is the bridge to mental arithmetic. A good moment to try it is when counting with the dots has become fast — if answers are being chosen before the counting finishes, the answer is already coming from their head. Hide them, and put them back if things stall. Going back and forth is fine.
If counting is slow even with the dots on, dropping a difficulty level is the quicker fix. Repeating sums up to 10 on Easy beats freezing on Hard.
Each new question is read aloud by the device's voice, as "3 plus 2?". Children who have not yet connected the digits to the symbols can pick up the shape of an equation by ear.
It says the words rather than the symbols — "plus" and "minus" — so a child can repeat it out loud. The speaker button replays the current question as often as needed.
If no voice is installed on the device there will be no read-aloud, but the equation is always displayed in large type, so learning continues. There is a sound toggle for when quiet is required.
A results screen appears after ten questions. That may sound short, but ten takes real concentration at this age. Finishing a set and seeing a score leads somewhere better than abandoning one halfway.
The score runs 0–10 and the best per difficulty is saved. Confetti is reserved for a perfect score or a new best — if something fires every round, the something becomes the goal.
Questions are generated fresh each time rather than drawn from a fixed set, and consecutive identical equations are shuffled away, so no two sets play the same.
Kids Math runs entirely inside the browser. There is no external communication of any kind.
The dots are CSS circles, the sound effects are synthesized on the fly with Web Audio, and the equations are spoken by the speech synthesis already on your device. With no images or audio files to fetch, it uses almost no bandwidth.
The only thing stored is the best score per difficulty, kept in your device's localStorage. No name or age is entered, and nothing about what was solved is sent anywhere.