To be better at math, you have to play board games

Researchers from a university in Santiago, Chile, have just published a summary of 19 international studies, which relate to pedagogy through play. It appears that playing board games twice a week on average, for at least 20 minutes can strengthen math skills for children aged three to nine.

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Concretely, after only a month and a half of playing at this rate (therefore a little less than the duration of the long holidays), for a third of the children, the results of tests of logical reasoning, mental calculation, and even motivation to doing exercises with numbers became superior to those of children who had not played board games.

What games are affected?

For this test, the researchers excluded games of chance and skill and focused on games in which the player must decide how to move pawns or choose cards in such a way as to alter the situation of other players. This includes, therefore, of course chess or checkers, but also simpler games like Monopoly, or pawn alignment games like Othello or Connect 4.

Other lessons from this study: it also works with on-screen reasoning or strategy games. But it appears for the youngest children, those under the age of six, these screen games generate less significant input than traditional games.

Board games can also develop skills other than math. Other studies have shown that board games in general can also promote language acquisition, memorization or critical thinking from the age of three. This also allows the management of emotions: in the game, there is both interaction with other players and learning from frustration, because you rarely win every time. The authors of this study are therefore campaigning for games to be used more as an educational tool at school.