My kids love maths. A key part of that is being at ease with the fundamentals - if a kid struggles with the fundamentals, it’s hard to build confidence on top of that. One of those fundamentals is being really good at times tables. At home we’ve always tried to make learning fun, and enjoyed adding a little competition to it too.

At school (an international school in Portugal for english-speaking students), they also use lots of fun strategies to teach kids their times tables. One of those is called 5 Minute Frenzy. It consists of a matrix printed out on paper, usually 10x10, with random multiplication questions that students have to fill in. The goal is to fill in as many as possible within 5 minutes. The kids love the challenge and the competitive nature of it.

Doing it on paper is cool, but not practical all the time…

So I built a free digital version of that. No email needed, no tracking, no personal data collected.

There’s just a lightweight username + a 4-digit pincode if kids want to rank on a leaderboard (not needed to play the game), and track progress via a GitHub-style heat map showing accuracy per times tables.

Technically speaking, it’s pretty basic - a next.js app, with Postgres under the hood for users, games etc, deployed on a digital ocean droplet.

I think the badges/leaderboard piece needs quite a bit of iteration, it might be too easy to climb up the ladder right now, but I’m experimenting with kids and seeing what lands.

What do you think?