The science behind
Times Tables
A two-minute read for parents — what multiplication fluency does for your child's maths, why multiple-choice beats fill-in-the-blank for beginners, and how the automatic levelling works.
1 Why times tables matter more than ever
In an age of calculators, some parents wonder whether memorising multiplication tables is still worth the effort. The research is clear: it absolutely is — but not for the reason most people think.
The real value is not that children can recite 7×8=56 on demand. It is that when 7×8 is automatic, a child can think about the actual problem in front of them — a fraction, an area, a ratio — without being slowed down by the arithmetic underneath it. Multiplication fluency is infrastructure. Everything in secondary maths is built on top of it.
2 Why multiple choice, not fill-in-the-blank
For children who are still building a fact towards automaticity, multiple choice is significantly more effective than recall from scratch. This is why.
The child must generate the answer entirely from memory. If the fact is not yet stored, the result is a guess, a blank, or a stressful pause. No learning happens from a blank.
The child sees the correct answer among plausible alternatives. Even when unsure, they can reason: "It is not 12, it is not 40 — so it must be 28." That reasoning process strengthens the memory trace.
Cognitive science calls this the generation effect: the mental effort of selecting and rejecting options encodes the fact more deeply than passively reading it, and more successfully than failing to retrieve it. Multiple choice done well is not an easy shortcut — it is a well-designed step on the path to full automaticity.
As the child gets faster at choosing, they are moving closer to automatic recall. The speed timer makes this visible.
3 Why the answer choices are carefully chosen
The five answer options are not random. The correct answer is always present, and the four distractors are chosen to be plausible but wrong — close to the correct answer, but not so close that every question is a coin flip.
For smaller products (like 3×4=12) the distractors are very close — perhaps 10, 11, 13, 14. For larger products (like 8×9=72) a spread of 4–8 is used, because differences of 1 or 2 at that scale would make the task unreasonably hard and frustrating.
4 How the automatic levelling works
The game starts every child at 3×3 — a fact nearly all children already know. This is intentional: an early success builds confidence and sets a fast time to beat.
From there, the game watches performance automatically. When a child completes a 10-question round in under 20 seconds twice in a row at the current level, the game concludes that this fact is becoming automatic — and steps up one level.
The rule for which number steps up is simple: if A is smaller than B, A goes up; otherwise B goes up. This keeps the two factors close together and ensures the child works through a natural diagonal path across the multiplication table.
If a child does not hit 20 seconds, the level stays the same. There is no stepping back down — the game is designed to be encouraging, not punishing. A child who needs more time at a level simply stays there until they are ready.
5 Why 10 questions per round, not 20
Times tables practice requires more cognitive effort per question than number bond practice, because the child is actively retrieving or reasoning from a larger fact space. Ten questions keeps each round short enough to stay motivating — typically 15–40 seconds — while still providing enough repetition to be meaningful.
Like the bonding games, the spacing effect applies: three short rounds across a day is more effective than one long session. The game is designed to be picked up and put down naturally.
6 What to expect over time
First sessions: Slow times are normal at each new level. The child is building the fact.
After a few rounds at the same level: Times drop noticeably. Recognition is becoming retrieval.
When the level steps up: Times may jump back up. This is healthy — a new fact is being learned.
Long term: The child builds a connected web of multiplication facts rather than isolated memorised answers — which is exactly what makes the knowledge durable and transferable.