Times Table Garden

Why a garden full of bees?

Times tables practice is usually a worksheet or a flashcard. Here the answer is the thing you catch. A fact goes up on the sign, bees drift past with numbers, and you tap the bee carrying the product. Each catch plants a flower. Catch it fast and right first time, and the flower is golden.

The game practises recall of the 144 facts from 1 × 1 to 12 × 12. Tapping a bee asks you to recognise the answer among close guesses. Typing it, with the keyboard or the number pad, asks you to remember it with no help.

Under the game is your garden: a 12 by 12 grid with a square for every fact. A square grows from seed to bloom as you catch that fact right first time in three different rounds. A fact that slips gets a drop of water and comes back more often until it grows again. This is a simple form of spaced practice, saved on your device.

Why quick recall helps

In 2008 the US National Mathematics Advisory Panel said students should develop quick recall of arithmetic facts, so their working memory is free for harder problems. England’s Department for Education makes a similar point. Since the 2021/22 school year, Year 4 pupils in England take a times tables check of 25 questions, with 6 seconds for each, covering tables up to 12 × 12.

On how to practise, a 2013 review of study methods by John Dunlosky and colleagues rated two techniques highest: testing yourself, and spreading practice out over time. The garden borrows both ideas. It is practice, and we make no promise about marks or grades.

A bit of times table history

Children have learned multiplication tables for about 4,000 years. In Old Babylonian times, around 1900 to 1600 BCE, student scribes copied tables onto clay and learned them by heart. Their numbers were in base 60, not base 10. The Penn Museum holds a school tablet from the city of Nippur with a teacher’s copy and a student’s copy of the 45 times table side by side. Both copies have mistakes in them.

In China, pupils learned the nine-nine table, a chant of short lines like “nine nines, eighty-one”. Tables of this kind turn up on bamboo slips from the Qin dynasty, more than 2,200 years ago. An even older table was announced in 2014. Among a bundle of bamboo strips held by Tsinghua University, 21 strips form a grid dated to around 305 BCE. It multiplies whole and half numbers up to 99.5. Historians call it the earliest known decimal multiplication table.

How to play

• Read the fact on the sign and tap the bee carrying the answer. On a computer you can type the answer instead.
• Twelve flowers fill a bed. The bar under the sign is the golden flower clock. Catch the right bee first time before it runs out for a golden flower.
• A wrong bee is a slip. It shows its own fact, the right bee glows, and the fact you missed comes back a few flowers later.
• Stars: one for growing the bed, one for 2 slips or fewer, and one for 9 golden flowers.
• The 16 beds start with the 2s, 5s and 10s, then the 3s, 4s, 6s, 7s, 8s, 9s, 11s and 12s, with mixed beds in between. The last bed mixes every fact.
• Calm mode turns off the clock and slows the bees. Free practice opens any table, and the watering round brings back the facts that slipped.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips for parents

Keep it short. One or two beds a day is plenty. The garden saves progress, so the facts that slipped will be waiting next time.

Start with calm mode if the clock feels stressful. Speed comes after accuracy. Turn the clock back on when the bed feels easy.

Point out that order does not matter. 6 × 7 and 7 × 6 are the same answer, so each new table is smaller than it looks. The beds ask facts both ways round on purpose.

Look for patterns together. The 5s always end in 5 or 0. In the 9s up to 9 × 10, the digits of each answer add up to 9.

Your turn

The bees are waiting with the 2s. Plant your first bed, then come back now and then to water the garden until all 144 squares are in bloom.