Here is a simple-looking arithmetic puzzle you often come across in puzzle collections. How quickly can you solve it? (Normally I stress that mathematics is not about speed; indeed, most mathematicians I know work slowly, as do I. But this time it’s different. …

Faced with students having to learn remotely in their homes due to the pandemic, teachers need to find new ways to keep their students engaged. Educational video games provide an obvious mechanism. If well designed, they are both educational and highly engaging. …

One question we get asked from time to time from people who have enjoyed playing our launch app Wuzzit Trouble is whether that puzzle is part of our new BrainQuake app. The answer is a “Yes, but …” Wuzzit Trouble was a standalone mobile game that presented players with 75…

Like many other companies, BrainQuake often describes our lead products as educational games. But what does that mean, exactly? It seems like a simple question that will have an equally simple answer: surely, an educational game is one where a player learns something by playing the game. But that can’t…

At BrainQuake we develop “hard fun” math-learning activities. But what exactly does that term “hard fun” mean? It’s certainly not our term. …

Just as I was getting ready to write this week’s blogpost, the news came out that the fabled, British-born, education thought-leader Sir Kenneth Robinson had died, aged 70. Along with many educators, we at BrainQuake have been greatly influenced by Robinson. His thinking about education, especially in relation to creativity…

In 2003, Professor James Paul Gee, a cognitive scientist who at that time was a profes­sor of reading at the University of Wisconsin, published a thought-provoking book titled What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. That same year, I and two colleagues at Stanford University organized…

One of the known benefits of game-based learning is that, providing the game is designed and constructed sufficiently well, it can help students adopt a positive and confident attitude towards the subject the game is intended to develop mastery in— in our case mathematics, with our particular focus being the…

I don’t know the answer to that question. Other than to say they use it in lots of different ways. I can say that, in many cases, people use math without knowing it, since we have succeeded in creating mathematical tools that where the math is completely hidden. Google is…