Math Puzzle Game

I made this math & reading puzzle generator for my daughter to practice her math skills when she was 5 years old.

It is a simple math game masked as a puzzle game. The player needs to find an animal by solving a math problem.

The online generator is available at https://aleris.github.io/math-puzzle/#/.

The UI is for generating sheets of puzzles, and the puzzles can be printed and solved on paper.

Steps

1. Solve the math operations in the first step and map each result to a letter. There can be more operations than the actual letters needed.
   For example, 4 + 1 = 5 -> C means that 5 is mapped to letter C.
2. Then in the second step, take only the letters that are mapped to the figured and form a word, for example C O W.
3. Finally, find the animal that has the name COW and you solved the puzzle.
4. Cut out the animal and tape it on the completed collection, see below.

You can configure different parameters to generate increasingly challenging puzzles. For example, at the beginning by daughter, had some problems with zero. She also only recognized big letters, but later on I also added small letters for the animal names. Then I also added bigger numbers and subtraction to increase the difficulty.

Collection

There is also a “Print collection” button that prints a sheet with all the animals and can be personalized with the kid’s name. I used it so that she had a tracker and to make it feel more like a game where you need to find all the animals by solving puzzles.

For my daughter, it “worked”. I gave her about one puzzle per day, and she finished the game by finding all 49 animals in about 2 months. In the beginning, she needed some help, but later on she was able to solve them by herself, even the harder ones.

This is her completed collection, still taped on our living room door:

The game puzzle sheet generator is written in Typescript and uses React. The source code is available on GitHub.