Maths GCSE Games: BBC Bite­size £Free (My Rat­ing 6/10)

As you might expect the BBC pro­vides some very wor­thy games to play online. The games are well designed but lack imag­i­na­tion. The for­mat for most of the games is sim­i­lar, you are are pre­sented with a story or a game and you are given a num­ber of ques­tions to progress through the story or game.

How­ever, the­se ques­tions do not relate to the story or the game. You are never in any dan­ger of los­ing your­self in the game.

All the BBC Bite­size Maths GCSE games can be found by fol­low­ing this link.

Here is my quick review of the games I found:-

RU Revis­ing

Well pre­sented but bor­ing con­tent. In this game your friends and fam­ily con­tact you (by com­puter or mobile) and ask you mul­ti­ple choice ques­tions about Maths. So I can see that lots of work has gone into mak­ing this game but in the end it’s just mul­ti­ple choices. 

If you get a ques­tion wrong you are told which is the cor­rect answer but there is no expla­na­tion of how to work it out. So either you know it or you don’t, so it’s not a learn­ing expe­ri­ence.

I wouldn’t want to “play” this again.

You’ll Never Get Any­where With­out Maths

This is another mul­ti­ple choice based game. This time it fea­tures a num­ber of peo­ple in their work­places. The ques­tions that are asked tend not to relate to the work­place. The advan­tage of this game is that if you get a ques­tion wrong it explains how to work out the cor­rect answer.

Mia Cadaver’s Tomb­stone Timeout

The extremely scary (not!) Mia writes out ques­tions on grave­yard tomb­stone and you have to select the cor­rect mul­ti­ple chance answer against the clock. There are 3 lev­els; Foun­da­tion, Inter­me­di­ate and Higher. You enter a nick­name and you can choose to play against any­one else that hap­pens to be online or set up your own group and play against your friends. The quicker you answer the higher you score. If you select the wrong answer you are told which was the cor­rect answer but not you are not shown a method to help you in the future.

Play­ing against oth­ers makes it more fun and makes you con­cen­trate but this game will only help you prac­tice and sharpen your cur­rent knowl­edge. It will not help you to gain new knowledge.

Spherox the Search for Home

I quite like this game. You have to choose from 3 sub­jects (could be Foun­da­tion, Inter­me­di­ate and Higher Maths or you could mix it up with some Eng­lish and Sci­ence). You then have to drive a lit­tle space­ship around a fairly straight­for­ward course within a time limit. You can earn extra time and points by answer­ing ques­tions on your cho­sen sub­jects. It’s not exactly Grand Theft Auto but it is amusing.

Bite­size Bingo

This is the best learn­ing game but also one of the most bor­ing. I bet you are amazed to learn that it’s a mul­ti­ple choice bingo game. So why is it the best learn­ing game? Because, before you attempt a ques­tion you are taught the tech­nique to answer it (you can skip straight to the ques­tion if you want). It’s just a shame that this approach is used in such a lame game. It would be much more effec­tive in an amus­ing game such as Spherox (see above), espe­cially if you had to learn and answer cor­rectly against a clock in order to com­plete your mission.

Bite­size Mobile Quizzes

You’ve guessed it!

Mul­ti­ple choice ques­tions on your mobile. I would not call this a game, it’s just a mul­ti­ple choice quiz, the only “fea­ture” is that it keeps tabs on your score. Mediocre.

In sum­mary, given all the tal­ent and mate­r­ial that they have avail­able, the BBC offer­ings are dis­ap­point­ing and unimag­i­na­tive. I could envis­age great, sus­pense­ful role play­ing games such as Doc­tor Who (where you would be his assis­tant and had to learn and use maths skills in so many sec­onds or min­utes in order to save the Uni­verse) or Dr. Wat­son fight­ing to save Sher­lock from Mori­arty.

I’m sure the aver­age 13 — 16 year-old could devise some­thing far more excit­ing than these dis­tinctly aver­age games.