Games

Games that teach the thing they are about

Every card, tile and path cell in these games carries a real item from the curriculum. None of them generate abstract shapes to remember. The memory demand sets the difficulty; the phonics and the number facts are what is being learned.

Ages 5–7

Letter Pairs

Turn over a letter and find the picture that starts with its sound.

Letter-sound correspondence, RF.K.3a

Ages 6–10

Fact Pairs

Match a fact to its answer, a fraction to its decimal, a picture to its number.

Equivalence across representations, 1.OA.B.3 / 3.NF.A.3 / 4.NF.C.5

Ages 5–7

Hold and Build

Listen to the sounds, hold them in your head, then build the word.

Blending and grapheme mapping, RF.K.2c / RF.1.2

Ages 5–9

Number Path

Watch the path light up in order, then walk it back.

Counting sequences and skip counting, K.CC.A.1 / 2.NBT.A.2

Ages 5–8

Word Flash

A word flashes, then hides. Which one was it?

Orthographic mapping of heart words, RF.K.3c / RF.1.3g

Ages 7–10

Running Total

Keep the total in your head as the cards turn over.

Fact fluency under updating load, 2.OA.B.2 / 3.OA.C.7

Ages 5–8

Which Way Round?

Watch the letter being written, then pick the right one.

Letter orientation and formation memory, RF.K.1d / L.K.1a

Ages 7–10

Sentence Carry

Listen once, then answer a question about what you heard.

Listening comprehension and syntax, RL.2.1 / L.3.1

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you these games improve your child's memory, focus or IQ. Working-memory training has been tested exhaustively and it improves the trained task and essentially nothing else — Sala and Gobet's 2020 meta-analysis of 2,375 children put far transfer at an effect size of 0.001 against active controls. In 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission fined the maker of Lumosity two million dollars for making exactly the claim we are declining to make.

What does transfer, reliably and with large effects, is practice of the material itself: retrieval practice, spacing, and mixing problem types. So the design is inverted. We do not train memory and hope the gain reaches the curriculum. We build curriculum practice and use memory load as the difficulty dial, because holding something in mind while you retrieve it makes the retrieval effortful, and effortful retrieval is better remembered — for that material.

The full evidence, including the studies that disagree with us →

Rules every game follows

No timer. Time pressure plus memory load produces anxiety, and anxiety reduces available working memory — it makes the thing worse while looking like effort.
No score, no rank, no streak. Nothing to farm and nothing to lose.
No abstract stimuli. Every item has a rung ID and feeds spaced review.
No visible memory level. If we showed one, parents would read it as a memory score, and we would be back to the claim we just declined.
Sessions end. Rounds are built to real attention spans — 60 to 90 seconds at five, two to three minutes at seven.