Lumos Labs has had more than 85 million downloads for its brain-training games since 2007. Now the company is launching four new math titles aimed at making learning math more fun.
The four games are adaptive, meaning they adjust the difficulty based on how well the player is doing. They are aimed at helping players learn a range of math skills that are relevant to adult life.
Lumos Labs’ Lumosity brand is geared toward helping people learn better. And the Lumosity Math category of games follows on the launch of its Language games earlier this year.
“Cognitive training remains our bread-and-butter, but the success of our Language games encouraged us to further broaden the Lumosity experience with additional complementary content,” said Anthony Garcia, head of product at Lumos Labs in San Francisco, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to offer players a way to practice Math skills within our signature game-based framework.”
The new Math category builds on the company’s 10 years of experience developing engaging, adaptive cognitive training games. Lumosity’s teams examined several different educational systems and developed a number of prototypes to identify the concepts best suited to gamification, or using game-like mechanics in non-game applications.
The Math category consists of games Raindrops, Chalkboard Challenge, Top That and Halve Your Cake. Raindrops is a numerical calculation game where users practice simple arithmetic operations — addition, subtraction, multiplication and division — against the clock. I played the game and I did OK, and I found that I had to sit up and pay attention to do really well at it.
Chalkboard Challenge and Top That train numerical estimation, or the ability to approximate numerical relationships quickly or with incomplete information. A proportional reasoning game, Halve Your Cake disguises practicing fractions and percentages with measuring out the correct ingredients for a cake.
“A lot of Lumosity’s success has hinged on our ability to transform traditional pencil-and-paper concepts into fun games,” said Garcia. “With Math, we were inspired by some daily dilemmas — quickly estimating tips, comparing prices at the grocery store — and I’m proud of the team for making math drills as engaging and accessible as our classic games like Train of Thought.”
The Lumosity Math category is now available to both subscribers and free users across all web and mobile platforms. Subscribers have the option to train exclusively with Math games by selecting the new Math Workout Mode, and they can find the individual games in the Lumosity Games Library. A fifth Math game challenging probabilistic reasoning is slated for release in the coming months, and the company has plans to expand both the Math and Language categories in 2018.
Lumos Labs has 130 employees, and it has raised $70.6 million to date.