Maths is fun!
This is actually the first game in a fairly long running series of maths-based educational titles that continued with the likes of Math Blaster Plus! and The Great Brain Robbery. This one is a little cruder than later efforts, but still does a decent job of combining learning with fun and is thus well worth a look. Potential learners/players get plenty of opportunity to practice their maths but in a more action-oriented environment which helps to make the process easier. It's best to start out with the earlier levels which let kids learn the basics of adding, subtraction, multiplication and division, but once they've got the hang of that, they can move on to later levels which include the likes of fractions and percentages. The gameplay is presented as a series of challenges, with a selection of answers along the top of the screen. The action part comes in as you move a character to the correct cannon at the bottom of the screen and blast the right answer. The whole thing is played out against the clock too, which adds a nice sense of pressure to proceedings. As a combination of learning and fun, this is largely successful. The action part isn't exactly complex but provides enough adrenaline for younger gamers to forget they're learning, while the problems are suitably challenging and should do a lot towards improving maths understanding. If you want to invest a bit of time, you can also create your own personalised lessons but even without this option, there's plenty of fun to be had here.
