If you work in an Indiana elementary school right now, you already know that the ground has shifted. Indiana HB 1634 requires every K-6 student to sit a math diagnostic screener, and schools must follow up with differentiated, evidence-based interventions for any child who falls behind. New state funding is tied directly to that evidence-based instruction. That is not a vague policy aspiration — it is a concrete, funded obligation sitting on your desk for the 2025/2026 school year.
I want to be upfront: XTables Champions is a young, UK-founded company and we are early in our conversations with US educators. But the question I keep coming back to is whether the intervention tools most schools default to actually meet the new standard — or whether they just look like they do.
What HB 1634 Is Really Asking Schools to Do
When I looked into the legislative text and the surrounding NCSL guidance, what stood out to me was the specific language around mathematical flexibility and conceptual understanding. Indiana, alongside a handful of other states moving in the same direction for 2025/2026, is not simply asking schools to drill children until they can recite multiplication facts at speed. The screeners are designed to surface gaps in number sense, not just recall gaps.
That distinction matters enormously. A child who can parrot 7 x 8 = 56 under test pressure, but cannot reason about why 7 x 8 is the same as 7 x 4 doubled, has fragile knowledge. The moment the problem is presented in an unfamiliar context, that child struggles. The mandate is pushing schools towards interventions that build genuine mathematical flexibility — which is a much harder brief to fill with a worksheet or a flashcard app.
Why Most "Intervention" Tools Miss the Point
Here is what I am seeing as I look across the supplemental math market aimed at elementary schools: a lot of products describe themselves as evidence-based because they use spaced repetition or timed drills. Those methods do have a research base. But the research also shows, pretty clearly, that timed, high-pressure recall practice raises anxiety in children who are already behind — and anxious children do not learn maths efficiently. You end up reinforcing the gap you were trying to close.
Schools in Indiana are now under a legal and financial obligation to show that their interventions are actually working. That puts real scrutiny on tools that generate impressive-looking dashboards while the underlying anxiety problem quietly gets worse.
As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, *"We built XTables Champions because we saw children switching off from maths entirely — not because they couldn't do it, but because the way they were being asked to learn it felt like a test they were always about to fail."*
That observation is exactly the problem HB 1634 is trying to solve at a system level.
How Game-Based Learning Meets the Evidence-Based Standard
XTables Champions is built around multiplayer games — Snap, Connect Four, Bingo, Battleship, and others — that children genuinely want to play. The times tables content is embedded inside the game mechanics, so children are doing repeated mathematical reasoning without experiencing it as drilling. The repetition is there; the anxiety is not.
What makes this relevant to the HB 1634 framework specifically is the Show Me How feature. When a child gets something wrong in a game, they do not just see "incorrect" — they get a visual breakdown of why the answer works the way it does. That is the conceptual understanding piece. The game builds fluency through play; the Show Me How layer builds the flexibility the new Indiana screeners are designed to measure.
We also have an analytics dashboard that gives teachers and school administrators visibility into where each child is struggling. For schools that now need to document differentiated interventions and demonstrate progress, that kind of record matters. From the conversations we are having with educators, the reporting burden around the new mandates is one of the things people are most anxious about. Having a tool that generates that evidence automatically, rather than adding to a teacher's workload, is something people find genuinely useful.
The Differentiation Problem in Real Classrooms
One thing I think gets underplayed in the policy conversation is how difficult true differentiation is to deliver in a class of 25 children with one teacher. A mandate that says every child must receive an appropriate intervention sounds right in theory. In practice, a teacher cannot simultaneously deliver five different worksheets at five different levels while keeping the rest of the class engaged.
Game-based learning handles this structurally. In an XTables Champions session, children are playing at their own level inside the same activity. A child who is still working on 2s and 5s is not visibly separated from a child working on 7s and 8s — they are just playing the same game at different settings. That removes the stigma that often makes intervention programmes counterproductive for the children who need them most. For schools with SENCO-flagged pupils or children with ADHD and dyslexia, that low-stakes environment is particularly important.
What Indiana Schools Should Be Asking Right Now
If you are a curriculum coordinator, a principal, or a SENCO-equivalent in an Indiana district trying to get your intervention stack ready for 2025/2026, the questions worth asking about any tool you consider are these.
Does it build understanding or just recall? Does it reduce anxiety or add to it? Does it produce the kind of documented evidence of progress your district will need to demonstrate compliance? And can it realistically be delivered by a classroom teacher without a significant increase in planning time?
Those are not trick questions. They are just the questions that the new mandate implies, and not every product on the market answers them well.
Talk to Us About K-6 Math Interventions
XTables Champions is actively looking to work with elementary schools and districts in Indiana and across the US who are navigating the new math fluency requirements. We are a small, founder-led team and we take every conversation seriously. If you are a school administrator, curriculum lead, or classroom teacher trying to build an intervention programme that genuinely meets the evidence-based standard, we would love to hear what you are up against.
Get in touch through xtableschampions.com and tell us about your school. We are not here to pitch — we are here to figure out whether what we have built is the right fit for what you need.