By: Anjay Kottapalli

It is obvious that board games can help you in certain skills but, shockingly, it can also help improve your math skills. A Team at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago in Chile are working to find out how much these games can help.

The team came to this conclusion by creating special groups for the children to play board games and then do math later. “In these studies, kids ages 3-9 played board games under the supervision of teachers or trained adults. The 20-minute sessions were held twice a week for about six weeks. In some cases, one set of kids (the intervention group) played number-centric board games, while the other (the control group) played board games that did not require math skills. In other studies, both the intervention and control groups played number-based games. They were, however, given different games, like Monopoly and Dominoes.” (DogoNews)

The researchers were looking for improvement in 4 key areas of math and the results were published on july 6, 2023. It showed that number-centric games are better at helping improve the children’s math than other board games. Also students who played these games got better in half of the four key areas. Also a third of the children scored better on math tests. This shows how useful board games can be in developing children’s brains and it could be used for other subjects too.