Professor Kageyama's Maths Training

The ‘Training’ series has been a remarkable success for Nintendo, arguably selling more Nintendo DS consoles than even the staple diet of Mario and Zelda games. The reason for the popularity has been its large appeal to occasional and older gamers, my own mother amongst them who insisted on getting one to play the original ‘Brain Training’.

‘Professor Kageyama’s Maths Training’ continues along the same lines as its predecessors, offering a number of daily tests according to your skill level and a variety of other self training games that can be played whenever you feel like it.

The ‘Daily Test’ consists of 3 short timed games that range from 10 seconds to 2 minutes to complete. They can be as simple as adding 2 numbers together to learning your 11723 times table or Long Division. Every day your attendance is marked and 5 days of completing the tasks successfully means promotion to the next level. Each level means new and more difficult tasks so that rather than being given a virtual brain age like in previous games of the series, you just have a level to maintain instead.

The game’s main method of improving your mathematical prowess revolves around the ‘Hundred Cell Calculation Method’, which, to you and me, is similar to the old Multiplication Grids we had on the walls of our primary school classroom. Numbers given are either added to, subtracted from or multiplied with 10 other numbers and your goal is to complete the whole grid in the quickest time possible.

For the most part the simple premise works okay, with you holding the DS like a book and filling out the answers on the touch screen while looking at the other side. However it has some glaring technical glitches, not least recognising the number 8. You will often find yourself hitting the clear button and having to frustratingly rewrite a number as time ticks away. There is also a problem whereby if you get a number wrong, rather than accepting the incorrect answer, it will pause allowing you to correct the mistake, which kind of defeats the object somewhat.

So, overall, does it work? It is hard to say for certain as I don’t believe I am the target audience, having never had any issue with basic mathematics. However, I was completing the tasks more quickly over time, but whether that is to do with familiarity rather than improvement I‘m unsure.

As a game itself though, I don’t see you settling down to an hour’s play or find yourself engrossed in beating your best time doing 100 long division problems. What you may find is that you regularly pop in ‘Maths Training’ for your daily tests over a cup of coffee in the morning as part of your routine, especially if you are one of those people who find numbers baffling. Who knows, it may even help you work out your share of the shopping bill that much quicker without the hunt for a calculator.