Multiplayer Games to Ease Maths Anxiety | Times Tables Games

The "summer slide" is the well-documented tendency for children to lose some academic progress over the long summer break. For most children it is a minor dip. For children who already struggle with maths, or who carry real anxiety around numbers, that dip can feel catastrophic when September comes around. What I keep reading in parent communities is that it is not just the lost knowledge that is the problem. It is the knock to confidence. A child who spent all of Year 4 slowly building a fragile trust with their times tables can feel like they are back to square one in week one of Year 5.

The pressure parents feel is real. And the instinct to intervene with structured practice is completely understandable. The problem is that a child who already associates maths with stress and failure is not going to respond well to being sat down with a worksheet on a sunny Tuesday morning in August.

When I looked into this more carefully, what stood out to me is how much the method of practice matters for anxious learners. Neurodivergent children, especially those with ADHD or high maths anxiety, are particularly sensitive to pressure, repetition without reward, and being made to feel like they are doing schoolwork during the holidays.

Forcing practice that feels punitive does not just fail to help. It can actively deepen the anxiety. You risk teaching your child that maths equals stress, full stop. And that association is genuinely hard to shift once it is embedded.

So the goal for summer should not be "replicate school at home". It should be: keep maths feeling safe, low-stakes and connected to something your child actually wants to do.

This is where things get genuinely interesting. Children with ADHD, autism, dyslexia and maths anxiety often have a completely different relationship with games compared to structured learning tasks. Games that they choose, that involve their friends or other players, that feel like entertainment rather than education, can engage parts of the brain that a worksheet never reaches.

Here is what I am seeing in our early conversations with parents and teachers: the moment maths is embedded inside a game a child already wants to play, the emotional context changes completely. They are not "doing maths". They are playing. The times table recall happens because it is part of winning, part of playing with a friend, part of something that feels worth doing.

Multiplayer matters especially. Solo educational apps can still feel like homework with better graphics. But when a child is playing against or alongside another real person, the social motivation kicks in. They want to do well because there is a genuine stakes. And that is a completely different psychological experience from sitting alone with a screen of practice questions.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, "We built XTables Champions around games kids already love because we knew that the minute it feels like a lesson, we've lost them."

1. Let them lead the session. Do not schedule a "maths time". Instead, let your child choose to play when they want to. Autonomy is huge for anxious learners. If the game is genuinely fun, they will come back to it.

2. Play together sometimes. A parent jumping in for a round now and then makes it feel social and low-pressure. It also gives you a genuine window into how your child is doing with their number confidence, without it ever feeling like an assessment.

3. Normalise it alongside other screen time. If your child sees multiplayer maths games as sitting in the same category as other games they enjoy (which, if the game is well-designed, they will), the resistance drops. It stops being "educational content" and becomes just something fun to do.

4. Keep sessions short and self-directed. Twenty minutes of genuinely engaged play is worth more than an hour of reluctant practice. Do not push for longer. Let the natural appeal of the game do the work.

5. Focus on confidence, not accuracy. Over summer, the goal is not mastery. It is keeping your child's relationship with maths warm rather than cold. If they are playing, they are practising, even if they are not getting everything right. That is more than enough.

At XTables Champions, we built our maths fluency platform specifically for children who struggle with traditional approaches to times tables and number recall. Our design is SEND-friendly from the ground up, and we use multiplayer games that children genuinely want to play, not games that feel like a classroom exercise dressed up with cartoon characters.

What we keep hearing from teachers and SENCOs is that the children who benefit most are exactly the ones who have been most left behind by repetitive drilling: neurodivergent learners, children with maths anxiety, kids who have convinced themselves they are simply "not a maths person". The multiplayer element is not a gimmick. It is the core of why it works for these children specifically. They stop performing for a teacher and start playing for themselves.

For parents facing six weeks of the summer slide worry, especially parents of children with ADHD, dyslexia or significant maths anxiety, this is what the research and our own early experience keeps pointing to: the format of learning matters as much as the content. Get the format right, and children will actually do it.

If you are a parent of a child with maths anxiety or neurodivergent needs, and you are trying to figure out how to keep them engaged with maths this summer without triggering stress, I would genuinely encourage you to take a look at what we are doing at XTables Champions.

Head to xtableschampions.com to learn more about how the platform works, or get in touch directly to ask us anything. We are a small, founder-led team and we actually respond. If you are wondering whether this would suit your child specifically, just ask. We would rather have an honest conversation than have you guess.