Wiebe, Carlson & Associates (WCA) is one of those companies that focuses on the educational games market. Their catalog includes around a hundred different products for teaching language arts, mathematics, and science. This year’s new products, though, are four math games.

Place Race and Digit Detective are both for teaching place identification to 2nd graders. The former is spinner-based and challenges players to identify numbers in the ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands places. The latter uses cards, is more like a bingo game, and tests place identification in whole numbers up to nine digits and in decimals down to three digits.

Bumper Car Math is also spinner-based. The players, though, get to choose whether to use it for addition or subtraction and must find the correct answer value among the bumper cars on the board.

Sixth graders can practice a variety of math concepts with Claim Stakers, including multiples, factors, squares, primes, and composites. The game comes with a double spinner and a board with a central grid of numbers 1 through 100. Around the outer edge of the board is a path of spaces with instructions such as, “Claim 3 multiples of 9,” or “Spin & claim the sum minus 3.” The first player to claim six spaces in a row is the winner.


One of WCA’s older games that I found interesting was GeoGems: Polygons. The game has a bingo element and a spinner but rather than forcing players to move along a set path, the idea is that players are looking for shapes that are exactly the spun number of spaces away and will match the property they’re hoping to cover on their bingo card. Also, the bingo cards come in different difficulty levels.