Adults of every age

Why it helps

Numbers turn up all day: a bill to split, a discount to check, a recipe to double. If some of those make you reach for your phone, you are in good company. In the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, on average across the OECD countries in the survey, one adult in four aged 16 to 65 scored at the lowest levels in numeracy, where basic calculations are fine but tasks with several steps are hard.¹

Numbers also turn up in decisions. In four lab studies of decisions involving probabilities, more numerate people were less swayed by how the numbers were framed and drew more precise meaning from them, though the authors note this can sometimes lead to worse decisions.² The simple, honest point is this: practising arithmetic makes you better at arithmetic. A few minutes at the same time each day is an easy habit to keep: in one study, daily habits grew stronger with repetition, and missing a single day did not materially slow them down.³

How Math Workout fits

World Challenge is a good start to the day: the same 50 questions as every other player, and your score on today's board. Brain Age Check is a quick, playful speed check with tiers from Turtle to Rocket, just for fun. Mental Math Master reads a sum aloud for you to answer, which is good practice for the sums you hear rather than see. And Galaxy Run turns the four operations into a space shooter for a lunch break.

Built around science, for this age

Testing yourself is one of the best studied ways to make things stick: in a classic study, college students who took recall tests on a passage remembered more of it a week later than students who read it again.⁴ That is the idea behind World Challenge. Mental Math Master asks your working memory to hold the numbers you hear while you work the answer out.⁵

You will hear big claims about brain training, so here is the honest picture. An independent review of the studies brain training companies cite found good evidence that people improve on the tasks they train, less evidence for closely related tasks, and little evidence for very different tasks or for everyday thinking.⁶ That is why we talk about practising arithmetic, which you use every day, rather than about training your brain in general. Different thinking skills are at their best at very different ages, and what you know, like vocabulary, keeps growing for decades,⁷ so Brain Age Check is a speed game, not a measure of your age or your brain.

• World Challenge
• Brain Age Check
• Mental Math Master
• Galaxy Run