The 2009 MathDice Tournament champs celebrate their victory.

Last month we held the 6th annual Arlington, Virginia 5th Grade MathDice Tournament. Teams from all 22 county schools came to the Saturday morning tournament, and for three hours we filled a school cafeteria with 100 kids exuberantly playing math!

Programs like this don't happen overnight. Our first MathDice tournament was held in neighboring Alexandria on Super Bowl Sunday, 2004. It didn't catch there, but the Arlington math leaders saw the competition and asked if we would organize a program for them. Teachers gradually embraced the program, got their teams practicing as early as January, and for Arlington students, this Tournament has become a rite of passage into Middle School. To learn more about the scoring and rules for a MathDice Tournament, check out our Tournament Guide.

While MathDice is a fantastic and fun learning tool for students to play anytime and anywhere, the most exciting thing about this Tournament is the sense of community it develops among students, schools, and families. It is incredibly powerful to see classmates, principals, grandparents, siblings, and parents gathered to celebrate math skills and rally around these smart thinkers. Check out these great event photos to see the creative posters, team costumes, and cheering crowds that made the Tournament so special!

We are now developing a MathDice Classroom Edition that we plan to have ready for you by this fall. Our goal is for the program to offer the same crackling excitement around math that is experienced in Arlington... pretty cool! We plan to bring MathDice into our Super Solver System, which will let us promote the idea that learning multiplication facts and memorizing exponents is "strategy training" that students need to improve their playing abilities.

By the fall, we hope to also have a Flash version of MathDice that your students can play online. Students will be able to form online teams and compete against other teams across the country! If you want your students to build their math facts and number fluency while engaged in genuinely fun, stimulating game play, stay tuned!


MathDice Rolls Fun & Learning Together
Charlotte Fixler is the Education and Curriculum Specialist at ThinkFun Inc.

	Students use mental math as they compete to hit the Target.

MathDice has been a hit with parents, teachers, and students alike ever since it rolled out over 10 years ago! Why? Because MathDice is a fantastically fun, fast-paced challenge that helps students improve their math skills!

MathDice is a wonderfully (even deceptively!) simple game that opens up a world of number learning opportunities. To begin, one player rolls the two 12-sided dice. Players combine the numbers to establish a Target Number. In the easier version, these two numbers are added, and for the more challenging version they are multiplied. Once a Target is established, the other player rolls the three 6-sided Scoring Dice. Using each of the numbers on the dice only once and combining them using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and/or powers, players work to calculate a math expression that comes as close as possible to the Target. Players go back and forth until one either hits the Target exactly or the other player can't find a closer number.

The beauty of a MathDice challenge is that it involves just three numbers. Sounds simple enough, but once players begin to contend with tricky operations, make choices about how to strategically place parentheses, and compete to compute equations before their opponent it can get plenty tricky!

Having taught elementary school, I know how difficult it can be to find engaging activities that strengthen computation skills. More often than not, these types of activities take the form of drills and uninspired worksheets. For teachers struggling to find an engaging alternative, MathDice is a dream come true! Playing MathDice reinforces fundamental math facts and pushes students to stretch their mental muscles in a fast-paced and fun learning environment! MathDice helps students learn while they play and leaves them eager for more... what could be better than that?!

Itching to get MathDice into the hands of your students? Take advantage of our latest Teacher Special — 4 sets of MathDice for only $10 through June 11th — a savings of over 50%!

We have received loads of feedback from teachers who have brought MathDice to their classrooms with great success. We are happy to announce that we are currently working to further develop MathDice into a rich, multi-leveled classroom program designed to meet the specific learning needs of grades K-6 while also addressing curriculum content standards.

If you are teaching this summer and interested in helping with MathDice testing, please contact me at cfixler@thinkfun.com. If you're off for the summer but would like to track along with us and offer feedback on this program as it develops, please drop me an email. I would love to work with you!