Diced Maths®

Australian Made & OwnedOpenSTEM® Diced Maths® are a new range of resources in the Mathematics subject area of the Australian Curriculum. Right now we’re focusing on the important knowledge and skills that require lots of practice and are typically regarded as tedious and boring: basic operations, times tables, quicker mental maths, approximation, number lines, Cartesian planes, and more. This will be expanded with comprehensive lesson plans (units) from Foundation level to Year 6, and potentially beyond.

None of the basic Diced Maths® materials rely on having an Internet connection: they are off-line, unplugged, no computers required.  Many of the Activities utilise fun polyhedral dice – that’s part of the reason for the naming of this group of resources – and some counters (or buttons).  Aside from that, you just need to print some PDFs (colour preferred, but B&W works fine) and laminate them, and you’ll be good to go!

Diced Maths® Number Reach™ logoThe absolute favourite with the students right now is Number Reach™. You can use this activity to have the students practice mental maths, problem solving, approximation and most of BOMDAS (brackets, order, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction) using whole positive numbers – all in the one game.  And they have fun while doing it!  This game can be played by individual students, small groups, or an entire class!

Diced Maths® Number Reach™ uses target numbers up to 999 (3 digits), whereas our Number Reach™ Junior uses target numbers up to 99 (2 digits). From our experience so far, at upper primary school level the students tend to already prefer playing the full game even though they regard it as challenging. So that is rather excellent!

Students love the activities – their “worst” complaints from the field so far are that they want a) more Diced Maths® activities and b) more time to do them!  Well, we’ll happily work on the first.  What else did the students say in their early feedback:

  • A change in the way we learn
  • Helps people understand
  • A little challenging
  • The activities enable you to write your own maths problems
  • Uses all your maths knowledge
  • I like the random choice of number
  • Fun way of learning maths
  • Group work that suits different abilities
  • Different type of learning activities

Go to the Diced Maths® resources.  The description of each resource notes the year level(s) mapped to the Australian Curriculum standards, and the tags include the relevant individual curriculum code(s).