A game: Balloons and dice One of the authors of this story, Ann Kajander, has a book Big Ideas for Growing Mathematicians with lots of activities to do at home.

Even for a game like Settlers of Catan, well-known for taking hours to play, “I might roll the dice only about 100 times in the whole game,” Crane said.

In the end they gave me three games to test out, two of which we played for a while in the hotel bar after dinner one night. The one that surprised me most is Math Dice.

Over time, dice used in playing games have changed in shape and size and evolved with considerations about fairness, chance and probability.

This year the coolest addition to the ThinkFun lineup was Math Dice Powers. Play is similar to the regular Math Dice, but exponents are used to determine the target instead of multiplication.

Dice, in their standard six-sided form, seem like the simplest kind of device—almost a classic embodiment of chance. But a new study of more than 100 examples from the last 2,000 years or so ...

Each Star Wars Math game is based on an existing popular and familiar game. Dueling Dice, for example, is a simplified version of blackjack, using a pair of dice instead of cards.

Improving a child’s sense of numbers, and their understanding of probability, fractions, ratios, shapes and patterns, can all be incorporated into daily life or with simple games.