Fractopia's activities are now real games, and no two rounds are the same

Every Fractions activity, from Crumb Meadow to Sugar Summit, is now a small animated game instead of a question with a row of buttons. You serve pizzas to a customer, send a frog hopping along lily pads, pop balloons, hitch fraction cars to a train, or dial a recipe into a fraction oven.

Fresh numbers every time. The questions used to come from a fixed list, so a child could meet the same one twice. Now every question is made on the spot, so each play has new fractions, new totals and new shapes.

Dressed for the place. Each continent has its own colours, scenery and friendly mascot, and each country picks its own treat and palette, so neighbouring activities look different.

A fix, too. On the welcome screen of an activity, the "back" link was white on a white button and could not be read. It is now black.

The same treatment reaches three more worlds

Fractopia was the test run, and it worked, so the games now travel. Numeria (numbers), Chronia (time) and Mintopia (money), 273 activities from Kindergarten to Grade 6, have been rebuilt on a shared set of nine game styles, and the other worlds can follow without starting from scratch.

Every world feels like its own place. In Numeria you pop numbers like balloons and hop a frog along rivers that are number lines. In Chronia you ring bells, turn the hands of a clock tower and load a time train. In Mintopia you drop coins into a till, type prices on a cash register and hunt for bargains. Each country within a world picks its own colours, mascot and answer style, so two neighbouring activities never look the same.

More ways to play. Instead of tapping a button under a question, children now type on a keypad, sort cards into bins, put coins on a tray, set a clock, order cards on a train or catch every leap year as it floats by.

Always new questions. Counting patterns, clock times, prices, change and discounts are made fresh each time, in English and in French, with the right number words, thousands separators, decimal commas and money formats for each language.

 Question ──> a game style ──> the world's costume ──> a child's answer
   fresh        (pop, sort,       (colours, mascot,
  numbers        type, hop...)      bells, coins...)

Blockopolis joins in

The fourth world is Blockopolis, the city of place value, with 93 activities from Kindergarten to Grade 6. Children build numbers from ones, tens and hundreds blocks, fill ten frames, trade ten for one, move a digit up or down a place, line up decimals, and round to the nearest ten or to a number of significant figures. It took the same nine game styles and a new set of question makers, with no new game engine, which is the point of building it once.

Primoria, the crystal caves of number theory

The fifth world to get the treatment is Primoria, where 72 activities from Kindergarten to Grade 6 now run on the same nine game styles. In the lower caves children pair up pebbles and sort numbers into "pairs up" and "one left over", then learn to call them even and odd. Further down they hop a frog along the multiples of 6, catch every factor of 36 as it floats by, type the missing partner in 24 = 4 × ?, and sort cards into factor, multiple or neither.

Primes, powers and roots. The deeper caves ask children to catch the primes among a dozen drifting numbers, decide by the last digits whether a number divides by 2, 5 or 10, and later by the tests for 3, 4, 6 and 9. They type squares and cubes, squeeze a square root between two whole numbers, and find a highest common factor or lowest common multiple by reading prime factors, the way two buses leaving together meet again.

Always new, in two languages. Every number is rolled on the spot, so a child who catches the factors of 36 today may be catching those of 48 tomorrow. The words, the days of the week and the way numbers are written follow the child's language, in English and in French.