A 3D game for iPhone, iPad and Android
Times tables your child wants to practise
Daisy the guinea pig runs down a tunnel. A problem appears at the top of the screen and four answer rings hang over the lanes — your child moves into the right lane and jumps through the ring for double points. You open the stats and see which table is actually failing.
- iOS 17+
- Android 8+
- 7 languages
- No ads, no in-app purchases
- Works without internet
How it works
Three seconds of rules. The rest is running.
Daisy runs by herself — the child only deals with the answer. No menus to click through, no ten-screen tutorial.
Read the problem
The task appears at the top of the screen, for example 7 × 8. The bar underneath shows how far it is to the gate.
Pick a lane
Dragging a finger across the screen moves Daisy between four lanes. A ring with a different number hangs over each one.
Jump through the ring
The lane Daisy runs under is the answer — and jumping through the ring doubles the points. A hit speeds the game up; a miss costs one heart.
Already know it? Go faster.
The TURBO button speeds the run up 1.8×. When your child instantly knows 6 × 7, there's no waiting for Daisy to reach the gate — and it pays extra points. Glowing orbs scattered along the track refill the turbo meter.
The speed bonus is multiplied by accuracy, so racing without answering is worth nothing. Speed only pays when the answers are right.
Scoring
For one correct answer
At the end of a run there's a bonus for average speed — multiplied by the accuracy of the whole session.
Why it teaches
You can't guess it. You have to work it out.
Most times-table games throw in three random numbers as wrong answers — so the child picks “the one that looks about right” and learns nothing. DaisyMath uses the mistakes children actually make.
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Hard problems come back more oftenQuestion picking is weighted by the player's history: a problem at zero accuracy shows up up to four times more often than a mastered one, with extra weight for slow thinking time.
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You set the rangePick tables from 1 to 12 with ready-made sets, plus a separate multiplier range. Only 6, 7 and 8 this week? Done.
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Four difficulty levelsFrom easy (9 seconds per problem, five lives) to expert (4.5 seconds, one life). The same material grows with the child.
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Hints at the start, then silenceTips show at the bottom of the screen for the first three runs, then disappear on their own — and a parent can switch them back on any time.
A gate for 7 × 8
Where the wrong answers come from
Ring order is random and lane colour never gives the answer away. The distractors are exactly the numbers a child writes down when getting it wrong.
The parent's screen
Not “played for 40 minutes”. Rather: what they struggle with.
Every answer is saved together with its thinking time. Out of that comes a picture you'd never get from quizzing at the kitchen table.
Time played
Progress
Accuracy over time
Accuracy by table
Needs the most work: 8×, 7×Accuracy by table
Needs the most work: 8×, 7×Where the trouble is
What’s already solid
No mistakes, in at least three attempts.Recent games
For parents
You buy it once. Nothing else happens.
No offer pop-ups, no account to create, no data sent anywhere. The app doesn't connect to the network at all.
Zero ads and in-app purchases
No banners, no reward videos, no loot boxes. There's nothing to buy by accident.
No internet, no accounts
Works on a plane, in the car and out in the country with no signal. No login, no email, no friends list.
Data stays on the device
Scores and statistics live in a single file inside the app. There is no server for them to reach.
A profile for each child
Siblings don't mix up their results. Every profile has its own settings, statistics and place in the family ranking.
Music you won't have to mute
Five energetic tracks shuffled without repeats, with a volume slider and an off switch. Sound effects and haptics have separate switches too.
A session lasts as long as it should
A run ends when the lives run out, not when patience does. Nothing in the game is built to drag a child into one more round.
Ways to work it out
You don’t have to memorise a hundred answers. Six will do.
The table up to ten has a hundred cells. Swapping the order, the zero on the tens, halving for the fives, fingers for the nines and plain doubling take ninety-four of them away. Six answers are left that really have to be learnt.
A hundred cells, six to memorise
- ×1 and ×10 — nothing to work out
- ×2, ×4, ×8 — just doubling
- ×5 — half of the ten
- ×9 — fingers, or the ten minus one
- the same fact the other way round
- left to memorise
The six that remain — 3 × 3, 3 × 6, 3 × 7, 6 × 6, 6 × 7 and 7 × 7 — are exactly the ones children get wrong most often. In the game they come back more often than the rest, because question picking watches the player’s accuracy.
The order makes no difference
7 × 3 is the same rectangle as 3 × 7, just turned round. One rule crosses off half the table.
Five is half of ten
Multiplying by 10 means adding a zero. Multiplying by 5 is that same number halved: 8 × 10 = 80, so 8 × 5 = 40.
Nines on your fingers
Bend the finger whose number you are multiplying by. Fingers to its left are the tens, those to its right the units — for 4 × 9 that leaves 3 and 6, which is 36.
A nine is a ten minus one
7 × 9 = 70 − 7 = 63. The check is in the answer: the digits of every multiple of nine add up to nine.
Double instead of memorising
Anyone can multiply by 2. By 4 is two doublings, by 8 is three. 7 → 14 → 28 → 56, and 7 × 8 is done.
Split the rectangle in two
A hard fact breaks down into ones the child already knows: 7 × 8 is 5 × 8 plus 2 × 8, which is 40 + 16.
A square, then one step sideways
Squares (6 × 6, 7 × 7, 8 × 8) stick by themselves, because both numbers are the same. From there it is one step: 7 × 8 = 49 + 7.
Elevens and twelves
Up to nine, ×11 is the digit written twice: 7 → 77. ×12 works out as the ten plus the double: 70 + 14 = 84.
Six times an even number ends in itself
6 × 4 = 24, 6 × 6 = 36, 6 × 8 = 48 — the last digit of the answer is that same even number, and the tens are half of it.
A trick does not replace memory — it shortens the way there. A child who works 7 × 8 out as 49 + 7 twenty times simply knows it is 56 on the twenty-first. That is what a timed game is for: to turn working out into knowing.
Where it comes from
The times table was pressed into clay 3,800 years ago
Pythagoras did not invent it, though half of Europe named it after him. It has been through clay, papyrus, bamboo, print and silicon — and it is still one of the first things a person memorises for life.
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c. 1800 BCE · Babylonia
Pressed into wet clay
In the scribal schools of Nippur pupils pressed multiplication tables into clay — over a hundred and sixty of them survive from that one city. They counted in base 60, not 10. What is left of that: hours of 60 minutes and a circle divided into 360 degrees.
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c. 1650 BCE · Egypt
The Rhind papyrus: multiplying without a table
Egyptians did not learn answers by heart — they doubled. To multiply 59 by 41 they wrote down successive doublings of 59 and added the rows whose multipliers make 41. Exactly the same trick as the ×4 and ×8 above.
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c. 305 BCE · China
The oldest decimal table — on bamboo
Twenty-one bamboo strips in the Tsinghua University collection are the oldest known multiplication table that counts in base ten; the earlier Babylonian ones were base sixty. The Chinese name 九九, “nine nines”, comes from starting the recitation at 9 × 9 = 81. Chinese 九九 and Japanese kuku are still in schools today.
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c. 100 CE · Greece and Rome
Where “Pythagoras’ table” comes from
The oldest known Greek table was written down by Nicomachus of Gerasa in his Introduction to Arithmetic. Boethius translated him into Latin and for a thousand years that was the schoolbook of the West — which is why in French and Italian the table is called Pythagoras’ table, although nothing links it to Pythagoras himself.
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1202 · Pisa
Fibonacci brings the digits that make a table worth having
In Liber abaci, Leonardo of Pisa showed Europe place value and Hindu-Arabic numerals. Only then did memorising answers start to pay off: XLVII × VIII has to be laid out on an abacus, while 47 × 8 can simply be known.
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1614–1617 · Scotland
Napier: multiplication turned into addition
John Napier published logarithms, which turn multiplication into addition, and three years later “Napier’s bones” — a set of rods with the table written on them, slid against each other like a slide rule. A portable times table for the merchant, the sailor and the astronomer.
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1631 · England
The × sign arrives in school
The sign a child sees on the screen has a date: William Oughtred used it in his textbook Clavis mathematicae. Before that, multiplication was written out in words or by simply setting the numbers side by side.
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today
Six seconds per question
In England, every nine-year-old has sat a national times-table check since 2022: 25 questions, six seconds each. In a 2013 study in which 232 children answered over 60,000 questions, the most-missed fact was 6 × 8. DaisyMath counts down exactly that kind of time — from 9 seconds on easy to 4.5 on expert.
Why bother today
The table was never there for calculating
Calculating is what the abacus, Napier’s bones, the slide rule and the calculator were for. The table is there so that calculating does not take up the mind. Working memory holds only a few things at once; a child who has to stop and work out 7 × 8 in the middle of long division or of cancelling a fraction spends it there and loses the whole problem. That is the only reason these answers are learnt by heart — and why they are practised against the clock.
Seven languages
One game, seven languages. Switched on the fly.
The flag sits on the very first screen, before any profile exists — a child will find their own language. Switching is instant, with no restart. Even date and time formats follow.
- 🇵🇱Polskipl
- 🇬🇧Englishen
- 🇫🇷Françaisfr
- 🇩🇪Deutschde
- 🇪🇸Españoles
- 🇯🇵日本語ja
- 🇨🇳简体中文zh
Ten minutes of running instead of twenty minutes of arguing over a workbook
DaisyMath runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS 17, and on Android phones and tablets with Android 8 or newer.
One-time purchase. No subscription, no ads, no account.