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Comment by ideonexus | Hacker News Reader

I've been writing little one-page javascript pages to introduce my four- and six-year-old to various mathematical concepts like cardinality, place-value, sets, factors, equivalency, etc, etc:

http://ideonexus.github.io/Explorable-Explanations/

The boys love some of them (others not-so-much). Based on this article, I'm getting lots of ideas for new ones to code. Most of the code is original, but I try to be careful to give credit to anyone whose code or ideas I build upon.

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The "Dragon Box" game on iOS is a fascinating way of presenting "algebra" (isolating a variable in a linear equation). It starts with a very abstract presentation of the rules (using cards with monsters on them - gradually introducing the rules) and eventually subs in letters and numbers. I suspect it might also be useful for adults who've had anxiety and poor success with more formal approaches.

It's a progressive game, where you have to complete a puzzle to get access to the next one. One thing that was surprisingly effective at motivating my four year old boy (almost five) was that they change the appearance of a cartoon monster at the end of each puzzle (or every 2-3 puzzles). He kept wanting to do the next puzzle to see how it changed.

As a footnote to your comment, the Dragon Box game is available on Android as well, and there are actually a series of games for different age groups and different skills.

For a slightly older audience, https://www.redblobgames.com/ has awesome interactive explanations.

(But I'd say you probably want to be at least around 12 years old and interested in programming games to seriously benefit from them.)

This is amazing! Thanks for bringing up this site.

I'm glad you like it! It's an awesome website. The tutorial as written describes the solution in Python, if memory serves right; but of course you can have a look at the source and see that the little animations are written in JavaScript. So it's a twofer.

And the kids might still like just clicking around, and seeing what happens. They might not understand the algorithms, but they can still see how opening a passage in a wall changes the optimal path that a baddy in a computer game might take to catch your character.

This is excellent. I've been meaning to do something similar for my five year old. As always the hard part is finding the time to get started. This will get us started.

(It was easier back when building this stuff was my day job! -- http://mw.concord.org/nextgen/)

That's a good idea. On the topic of place value, I've been wondering whether either of these concepts is suitable for entertaining youngish minds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeckendorf%27s_theorem (leads to a number representation)

https://oeis.org/wiki/Primorial_numeral_system (could be base for applet game: represent a number in this system)

Or, also https://oeis.org/wiki/Factorial_numeral_system

Ohhh... I like these. I was thinking of an interface for exploring binary algebra one and the Zeckendorf Theorem would fit right into it. I think getting kids to think in other systems expands their appreciation of math.

The word families page is great! I'll have to sit my daughter down with it today.

I should probably bite the bullet and get comfortable enough with javascript to take your approach. Here are some pico-8 demos I made with similar ideas:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3846

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3259

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3136

In the Factors Demo, could you change the degree when you paint the next star? Maybe even change the degree between the factors the same as the first one. I think that might look a little nicer.

I think I know what you mean. The factors are drawn as a tree, and the way things are drawn now, it's possible for the line segment drawn for a child to go partway along the line segment drawn for its parent. Do you mean that I should rotate the children slightly so that this sort of alignment doesn't happen?

The ones I tested have really good content and work well on mobile. Our 5 year old has been begging us to play with "her phone," so I'll be sharing these with my partner. Thanks for sharing these, they're fantastic!

Thanks! I struggle to make them mobile-friendly since younger children have a hard time with using the mouse and touchscreens are much more accessible for them. I keep learning a lot of CSS on the way, but it's really not my specialty. I would love for someone with CSS skills to rework my mess.

Oh, very nice.

I earned my first money programming little games which looked like the coordinate one.

I always dream about recreating something like this, but keep deferring it. I should kick myself in the butt and deliver.

Your "Pattern Blocks" game isn't working for me, or is it that I don't know how to use it??? I drag the shapes to the grid and none of them want to stay...

I tried that first too. You have to just click the shape, and it appears.

Looks interesting. You have a typo on the main page: "Mathmatics".

Awesome, thanks for sharing!

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