“I’m not a math person!” my friend exclaims when we sit down to play Dobble (called Spot it! in the US) – a card game where any two cards you draw will share exactly one matching symbol. On the surface, it’s just a game of speed and observation. But a mutual friend, a mathematician, began explaining that the game’s very structure is rooted in deep geometry. Interestingly, while there are 55 cards in the deck, the math dictates there should be 57. He was walking us through the concept of a finite projective plane, and the mystery of the two missing cards.
My non-math friend smiled politely, and opted out from the game.
What does it mean to be a math person – or not to be one? If you teach math, you’ve probably heard it from students too, just in different words: “When are we ever going to use derivatives in real life?” “Why do we need to know this if we can use calculators?” And now, increasingly: “Why learn it when AI can do it?”
You are a math person. But it’s not what you think.
Most people picture a math person as someone who calculates quickly, remembers formulas and never needs a calculator, pen or paper, or never even makes mistakes. That image is wrong, and can do a lot of damage.
Being mathematical is about curiosity in the face of abstract things. It’s the ability to imagine a model, even a rough one, and use it to understand something you couldn’t see before. It’s looking at a card game and wondering why the pattern always holds, or whether there might be combinations nobody tried. It’s the capacity to approach a problem you’ve never seen before, make a plan, and stay with it long enough to find out. And it is absolutely making mistakes! And then taking a step back and iterating and trying again.
Most of us are more mathematical than we think. The issue isn’t the ability – it’s whether we were given the chance to experience math as something worth being curious about.
That’s why what happens in K-5 classrooms matters so much. These students are not yet decided. Their relationship with mathematics is still forming, and whether math feels like discovery or dread in those early years will shape how they answer the question “am I a math person” for the rest of their lives. The data on what’s happening in those classrooms now gives cause for concern.
The problem didn’t start with the pandemic, but the pandemic made it impossible to ignore
Years before COVID-19 disrupted classrooms, international assessments were already sounding the alarm. PISA 2022 results, the most recent available, confirmed what many educators already felt: math performance has declined sharply across dozens of countries, including the United States. Among American students, math scores dropped by 13 points compared to 2018, the largest decline since the assessment began. The US ranked 28th out of 37 OECD countries in mathematics.
The pandemic accelerated learning loss, but it didn’t create the underlying problem. Traditional math instruction moves too fast, gets abstract too soon, and too often treats math as a set of facts to memorize rather than a way of thinking to develop. Students disengage, anxiety builds and the cycle becomes very hard to break.
In the classrooms this shows up every day: in the student who shuts down when a new concept is introduced, in the classroom energy that drops the moment worksheets come out, and in the gap between what students can do and what they believe they can do.
The anxiety problem is real, and it starts early
Math anxiety is a documented psychological phenomenon that measurable affects performance, and research consistently shows it can take root as early as first and second grade. It also tends to compound: anxious students avoid challenges, miss practice, fall behind and become more anxious.
A 2025 quasi-experimental study by Zaharaddeen et al., conducted with 200 secondary students preparing for high-stakes national exams, found that students using gamified platforms, including Kahoot!, showed significantly lower mathematics anxiety after six weeks compared to a control group. Both groups covered the same content with the same frequency. Only the format was different. The mental shift from “this is a test” to “this is a game” changes the psychological experience of mathematics in ways that show up in real outcomes. Features like instant feedback, points and the general mood of the experience, help students to reframe assessment as a challenge rather than a threat.
What the research says about game-based learning in math
A comprehensive meta-analysis by Dr. Osman Özdemir, published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning and synthesizing 43 independent studies, found that Kahoot! boosts academic achievement with an effect size of 0.772 — a result equivalent for one letter grade boost. For knowledge retention, the effect size was 1.492, which is exceptionally large by the standards of educational research. Students who learn with game-based formative assessment don’t just perform better in the moment. They remember more.
Game-based tools like Kahoot! work because they change the feedback loop. Instead of a student completing work and waiting days to find out how they did, they find out immediately, question by question. That immediate feedback helps students identify exactly where their understanding breaks down, before confusion becomes habit. It also gives teachers real-time visibility into where the class is struggling, making instruction more responsive and precise.
Motivation matters here too. When students experience competence, when they get something right and feel it, they want to try again. Game-based learning builds those moments of competence deliberately and repeatedly. For students who have already started to believe they are “not math people,” those moments can shift the mindset.
The teacher’s role is irreplaceable — and game-based tools support it
None of this is an argument for replacing teaching with technology. The research is clear that what makes game-based tools effective is how teachers use them: to open a lesson and surface what students already know, to check understanding mid-way through a concept, to give students low-stakes practice before a high-stakes moment.
Used this way, Kahoot! functions as a formative assessment tool that makes learning visible — to the student and the teacher simultaneously. A five-question Kahoot! at the start of class tells a K-5 teacher more about where her students actually are than a week of completed worksheets. It also tells the students something: that understanding is the goal, not performance, and that confusion, and yes, also mistakes, are part of the process.
Building math confidence for the long term
The students in K-5 classrooms today are forming their relationship with mathematics for life. The beliefs they build now, about whether they are capable, whether math is for them, whether struggle means failure or just means not yet, will follow them through middle school, high school, and into adulthood.
Teachers working with this age group have a genuine opportunity to intervene in that story. The goal isn’t to make math trivial; it’s to make it engaging enough that students stay in contact with it long enough to actually learn it.
When learning is active, feedback is immediate, and the emotional stakes of a single wrong answer are lowered, students learn more and remember it longer. For K-5 math, game-based learning is a practical tool to use to lower the stakes of practice, and build self-confidence.
Not everyone ends up being a mathematician (by profession at least), but having the curiosity to ask “How does this work?” is something we can nurture in every student. My friend doesn’t need to understand finite projective planes. She just needed to feel like the invitation to be curious was for her too.
…Oh, and the two missing cards from the Dobble deck? Personally, I like to think the creators left those two cards out on purpose, a little Easter egg for the ‘math people’. Or maybe they just knew that a 57-card game of Dobble would be two cards too long for a Friday night. Either way, the math is there, waiting for anyone curious enough to look.
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