My daughter has been doing multiplication quiz sheets at school to help her learn to multiply quickly in her head. The way it works is the teacher hands out a worksheet with 100 simple multiplication problems on the page, all featuring a number – like 5: 6×5, 8×5, 9×5, etc. For now they are always single digits. The kids are then given 5 minutes to finish as many problems as they can. If they finish 90 or more of the problems, then the time is cranked down to 4 minutes and they do it again until they can get 90 or more, then 3 minutes, etc.
She’d like to get better at them more quickly (they only do a worksheet every few days), but I didn’t want to have to come up with these math worksheets by hand all the time, so tonight I took an hour and wrote a simple little program to do it for me.
At present, I only really wrote it to scratch my own itch – so while it will let you choose to do addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, the division will produce answers that have remainders, and the subtraction will produce answers with negative numbers. Also, the printing is pretty basic – you can’t set margins, for example. For now this fits my needs, so I’m not going to bother improving it unless someone requests I do so.
Some items I may improve in the future:
- Allow the user to select the range to something more than 0-9
- Allow the user to decide how many problems to print – 1 – 100
- Allow the user to decide if the problems should be randomized or not
- Clean up division to not produce remainders
- Clean up subtraction to not produce negative numbers
- Beef up printing system
- Others?
So, without further ado, I give the world MathFacts – maybe you’ll find it useful in teaching some arithmetic to your youngster:
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MathFacts For Macintosh |
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MathFacts For Windows |
Release History:
2/7/2010 – initial release
2/14/2010 – improved randomization of problems on the same line
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