Math Arena Reviewer's Comments

Play 20 different mini-games or enter competitive math tournaments with Math Arena, our "TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award" recipient. Math Arena, designed by Carstens Studios Inc and published by Houghton Mifflin Interactive, is an excellent supplement to classroom instruction and consists of a series of games that can be played alone or with up to three players. This is a good selection for school use, home school use or just for fun.

Math Arena covers introductory geometry topics, counting money, addition/ subtraction, patterns and Venn diagrams. However, it does not cover multiplication and division well, if you are looking for a product that can increase these skills you may want to look at our #3 pick, Quarter Mile Math.

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Teaching Tools:  

This program includes 20 activities including mini-games with time trials and "buzzins." The "buzzins" can support up to three players with a choice of easy or hard difficulty. It also has a tournament mode where up to three students move through a series of competitive games.

It has 10 time trials including Array Reversal, Percent Crossing, Quick Change and Venn. Math Arena also includes 10 "buzzins" where up to three students can compete against each other in games like Budget Breaker, Pattern Buster, Mistake Catcher and Predictor.

Since this product was developed with classroom use in mind, it can run reports that reflect students' performances. It also comes with a teacher's guide that includes other classroom activity ideas and worksheets; these could also be useful for home-schoolers.

Topics Covered:  

This is primarily a game-based program meant to supplement classroom instruction. The games cover the topics of Venn diagrams, percents, money, symmetry, arrays, patterns as well as addition, subtraction and introductory geometry, multiplication and division.

It would be nice if it delved into multiplication and division more.

Ease of Install/Use:  

The games are easy to play and figure out and the program downloads quickly. Although on our computer it did not automatically begin when we installed it, we had to go to the CD drive, select "install" and "math" and then run the program.

This program can run on most systems including Windows programs as well as Macintosh systems 7.5 or higher.

Help/Support:  

Sunburst Curriculum Software provides extraordinary product support. As mentioned above Math Arena comes with a teachers manual that covers math topics as well as installation/system information and a contact page that includes web address, phone numbers, email and physical address.

Online they post a long list of FAQs and their telephone, email and fax numbers for technical support.

Summary:  

Math Arena is an applicable program for pre-geometry and basic math students and a good choice for classroom or home school use.

However if you are looking for a drill program that covers multiplication and division better, see The Quarter Mile Math. Alternatively, for a program that covers all subjects in more of a textbook type format see, Math Success.