We have just beta released a new free maths games website which is starting to get quite a bit of traction in the UK. It’s free, has no ads, and allows kids to compete head to head but doesn’t allow them to communicate directly. It is really KS1 & 2 focused but we are getting lots of use from secondaries (or we were last week before half term).

We have just added a few new teacher features (class registration, reports etc) and if you have any ideas or queries drop me a line, or if you like it you could put in a link.

I have had a chance to look at the site this weekend and to test it with a low ability class of 11/12 year olds today and I’m delighted with it!

The site allows pupils from around the world to compete against each other at mental maths questions in a completely safe environment, no actual personal details just clever usernames made from colours and animals (I’m bluepig22!).

The competitive element is the clincher, the class I tried it with today are difficult and disaffected but did more Maths today than they have for most of the year.

The site is simply designed and my class enjoyed beating not only each other but pupils from Brazil, Australia, France, Japan……

I’ve not even looked fully into the class reports feature but this could be most useful for identifying weaknesses and future teaching points.

A nice touch is the graduation medal that you get when you have done really well at a certain level, this really encouraged pupils to move onto a more difficult level rather than sticking with the easy questions all day.

An excellent, free resource, well done Richard!  Let me know what you think

It took some time agreeing how to go about this with my school, concerns over pupil safety and representation of the school were obviously paramount, but to be fair school have been wholly supportive of the project. I have kept the terms of use as simple as possible and spent half a lesson discussing the correct use of the wiki and how important it was the pupils used it respectfully. They have taken to it fantastically, they are taking great pride in seeing their work online.

At present I am simply letting 1 or 2 pupils per lesson be our blogging scribes, recording the details of the lesson and then afterwards I am adding copies of anything that I think useful (for example photos of pupils work and copies of the IWB pages). This has proved fantastically useful at the start of each lesson as a means to recap what we have done so far in the topic.

At first I asked pupils to sign up to wikisapces themselves as a homework, this was not successful and I ended up with only two users. Instead I spent a little time setting up accounts for each pupil using the gmail address trick, each pupil having an address of myclass+THEIR NAME@gmail.com. This also has the advantage that any messages sent via the messaging function in wikispaces automatically get sent to my email account.

I must admit that wikispaces messaging function hadn’t crossed my mind at first, it is effectively an email system within wikispaces. The pupils found it within about 5 mins! This was a concern at first, especially as I read this at the same time the issue arrived at my door. However after a little reflection I decided that it shouldn’t be a great problem and sent a simple message to all pupils asking them to use it responsibly for discussion on topic and nothing else. AS I was receiving copies of all messages I was rather pleased to see a “maths has become cool” replied by “yeah!!!!! this is better than doing work” which made my day.

Please head over to the blog and leave the pupils a comment if you feel inspired, I’m sure they would be delighted. I plan to continue with this for the next half-term and if successful I’ll roll it out with some other classes. Some ideas in the pipeline at the moment are getting each pupil to add something as part of a homework, and also to get them all to take pictures using their mobiles for use with one of the forthcoming topics.