A student that experiences a lot of negative feelings can suffer from math anxiety. Negative experiences like frequent failures can increase math anxiety. Math anxiety can subsequently keep increasing stress related to math, keeping the performance of math low.

A total of 207 children (age 8 to 12) were divided among the 3 difficulty categories and played for six weeks. Math anxiety, feeling of competence and math abilitiesd were measured at the beginning and end of the experiment.

The results suggest that children who experienced a higher succes rate, were more motivated to practice math in Math Garden and improved their addition-subtraction scores significantly. More research is necessary, however experience of success seems to be an important factor to improve math skills.

Literature:
Jansen, B. R., Louwerse, J., Straatemeier, M., Van der Ven, S. H., Klinkenberg, S., & Van der Maas, H. L. (2013). The influence of experiencing success in math on math anxiety, perceived math competence, and math performance. Learning and Individual Differences 24, pp. 190-197.

Additionally a Dutch primary school named “Het Spinnewiel”, organised a mathmarathon to raise money for Ethiopia. Together the children collected over 200.000 in-game coins, raising a total of €1500,-. We’re always open to such initiatives.

Right now we’re working diligently to release a Dutch language game, using the same concept as Math Garden. It wouldn’t be too surprising, if an English version appeared sometime in the future.

We hope that you all had a wonderful vacation this summer.

Did everyone play in their garden this summer, or have some of your plants withered away?

A garden with no plants is a real pity, so we hope you are all ready to make your gardens all beautiful again.

Over the summer, we learned some interesting facts that we wish to share with you:

• There are currently nearly 40,000 Math Garden users.
• Over 350 schools in the Netherlands practice math with the Dutch version of Math Garden.
• One fourth of all the schools in Amsterdam (the capital of the Netherlands) practice math in the Math Garden.
• In total, over 40 million math problems have been solved in the Math Garden.
• Math Garden is used all over the world. The Math Garden is used in Germany, Italy, United States, Switzerland, Malaysia, Singapore, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Scotland and India.

As you can all probably see, our Math Garden team likes numbers, statistics and everything that grows. For this new school year, we look to cultivate the Math Garden even more to include more games, problems, and users.

The Math Garden Team

This is a short overview of our latest Math Garden updates.

As you all may have noticed we have decided to change our name into Math Garden (instead of Mathsgarden). Our domain is still: www.mathsgarden.com (Mathgarden.com isn’t available). We also have a new URL: math.trackandteach.com. Both URL’s will lead you to the Math Garden website.

We have recently changed our login page. It’s no longer possible for children to log into Math Garden with a school password. To make this clear we have removed the school pictures from the login page. All the users (children and teachers) have to log into Math Garden by entering their personal username and password. If children don’t know their username or password they can ask their teacher.

The most important reason for this is that the children had to click on their group. Only ‘groups’ or ‘grades’ are different for English or American schools. Because we want this program to be international, we decided not to use the term grades any more. In the Garden Center we changed grades into reference groups. It has the same meaning but can also be used internationally.

Finally, we have improved our results page in the Garden Center.

I hope you will find these updates an improvement. If you have any comments or questions regarding our changes/ updates, please let us know.

We hope you have all enjoyed your holiday? As promised we hereby send you the answers to the Math Garden Christmas sums from our last blog post in 2010.

• Make the number 63 with the following operators: +, -, x en / and figures: 1, 6, 9.
  • (1+6)*9=63
    (6+1)*9=63
    9*(1+6)=63
    9*(6+1)=63
• Make the number 44 with the following operators: +, -, x en / and figures: 3, 9, 10, 13. 
  • (3*(9+10))-13=44
    (3*(10+9))-13=44
    ((9+10)*3)-13=44
    ((10+9)*3)-13=44
• Make the number 24 with the following operators: +, -, x en / and figures: 1, 3, 4, 6.
  • 6/(1-(3/4))=24

This Christmas sums are selected from our new game ‘Numbers’.

We have selected 3 Christmas sums from our new game ‘Numbers’. For every sum you have to use all the figures: 

• Make the number 63 with the following operators: +, -, x en / and figures: 1, 6, 9.
• Make the number 44 with the following operators: +, -, x en / and figures: 3, 9, 10, 13.
• Make the number 24 with the following operators: +, -, x en / and figures: 1, 3, 4, 6.

We wish you all a lot of fun with this math problems during the holidays!

In our first blog of 2011 we will present the answers to this math problems.

Sign up now for a demo account to try Maths Garden!

The Maths Garden watering can is travelling from Amsterdam to all over the world.