Guest Blog: DominoticeMath

I found out about a fun new app, DominoticeMath, that helps to practice fact fluency. The founder of the app, Piroska Rakoczi, is from Hungary and we had a great chat about why she developed the app. Here is her story...

I was tutoring a 9 year old girl who was struggling in mathematics. In the first session, I realized 2 things: she is clever and she hates math. She did not focus on my explanations. She could not solve the problems that they were learning at school because she hadn’t mastered computation skills from a previous grade, such as multiplication and division. What should be done? I had a few minutes to think of a solution. As I have a daughter, I had the experience that playing games can work wonders in teaching. So, I asked Emese, the girl I was teaching, to try 5 times 3. I told her that I would measure the time with my smartphone. When she finished calculating I wrote her time on a paper. Afterwards, we worked through a multiplication lesson and at the end of the lesson she would be given the same task and I would measure the time again. She was hooked. She wanted to win. And at the end of the lesson she was solving the computation question in less than half of the time I measured before my explanations and her practicing. She was happy with her result.

So that day I decided to teach her by gamifying the learning. I developed and planned games for her. One of them is DominoticeMath. What is DominoticeMath? It is a new digital game based on the old domino game.  While playing dominoes, you must match dots to dots, however in DominoticeMath you must match numbers to expressions. The idea seemed to be good, but I soon realized that it worked much better as a digital app. So, I hired a coder from Germany and a graphic designer from Pakistan and the three of us built the DominoticeMath app that now can be downloaded from Google Play Store.

I think that there are some important advantages of DominoticeMath. As the player plays against time, it allows the player to compete against his/her self. Since DominoticeMath was originally designed for kids, the players are rewarded with badges; a bear, a dog or a horse depending on the speed at which the player matches the dominoes. The badges are associated with point values so the player has a score, which further gamifies the learning. And the production of players can be compared to one and other. This feature of the game gave my team the idea to run a DominoticeMath contest which runs from November 15, 2021 -  December 22, 2021. 

Right now the app is only available for Android from the Google Play store. I played it with my 10 year old son and we had a blast! The game was engaging, challenging and fun. We played together, worked together and had a lot of laughs. As far as how we do grades in school in the United States, I would recommend this app for Grades 4 and up. It’s a great way to practice. If you have younger kids, definitely start with the original dominoes games. There are so many skills packed into the game play and kids don’t even realize they’re practicing. If you try out the app, I’d love to know your thoughts!