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It may be the case that what these kids need is just much more practice than the rest of us

starts with a game involving a number line

“What is the number that is right in the middle between 200 and 800? Do you know it?

A classic sign of dyscalculia is difficulty in grasping the place-value system,

A soft computer voice tells Christopher to “find the number and click it

The game involves zooming in and zooming out to rescale the number line

talks through each move — a strategy that Babtie encourages

but it takes him more than a minute to locate 210. His classmates, meanwhile, are learning to multiply two-digit numbers.

Butterworth

made his name probing obscure speech and language disorders

tested 31 eight- and nine-year-old children who were near the bottom of their class in mathematics but did well enough in other subjects.

Compared with normal children and those with dyslexia, the dyscalculic children struggled on almost every numerical task, yet were average on tests of reading comprehension, memory and IQ.

Tetris-like game called Numberbonds, in which bars of different lengths fall down the screen

select a block of the correct size to fill out a row

emphasizes spatial relationships, which some dyscalculics also struggle with.

The Number Sense games, including a snazzy-looking iPhone version of Numberbonds, are intended to nurture the abilities that

contends, are the root of numerical cognition and the core deficit of dyscalculia — manipulating precise quantities.

In a game called Dots to Track, for example, children must ascribe an Arabic numeral to a pattern of dots, similar to those on dice.

When they enter the wrong value — and they often do — the game asks the children to add or remove dots to achieve the correct answer.

Other students are improving more slowly, but it is not easy to say why

Dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder are common among dyscalculics, and it can be difficult to untangle these problems,

with the right practice and attention from teachers and parents, dyscalculic children can thrive,

computer games are a supplement, not a replacement, for one-on-one tutoring.

in 2009 that Number Race, a game his group developed, modestly improved the ability of 15 dyscalculic kindergarten children to discern the larger of two numbers, but that it had no effect on their arithmetic or counting

a Swiss team reported in 2011 that a game that involves placing a spaceship on a number line helped eight- to ten-year-old dyscalculics with arithmetic

studied the children in an fMRI scanner during a task that involved arranging numbers.

one month after training, the children showed increased activation in the intraparietal sulcus and reduced neural activation elsewhere in the parietal lobes — a hint that their improvements in arithmetic were related to changes involving brain areas that respond to number.

hopes to monitor the brains of students such as Christopher as they practice Number Sense, to see if their parietal lobes are indeed changing

turned down by every funding source he has applied to

dyscalculia, like other learning disabilities, takes a toll on productivity

it doesn't attract much attention or money

In the United States, for example, the National Institutes of Health spent $2 million studying dyscalculia between 2000 and 2011, compared with more than $107 million on dyslexia.

A second ancient number system allows humans and many other animals to instantly and precisely recognize small quantities, up to four.

People who are poor at distinguishing approximate quantities do badly in maths, suggesting that the approximate-number system is crucial.

some work shows that dyscalculics are poor at recognizing small numbers, suggesting that this ability is also fundamental to numeracy

scans of people with dyscalculia suggest that their intraparietal sulci are less active when processing numbers and less connected with the rest of the brain compared with numerate children and adults.

views such results as consequences, not causes, of the poor numerical abilities that characterize dyscalculia.

Approximation and a sense of small numbers, while critical, are not enough for humans to precisely grasp large numbers,

calls this 'numerosity coding': the understanding that things have a precise quantity associated with them, and that adding or taking things away alters that quantity.

argues that another cognitive capacity is even more fundamental to number sense

Language, he argues, empowers humans to integrate the two number systems — giving them the ability to intuitively distinguish, say, 11,437 from 11,436.

young children who could not yet count past two nonetheless understood that adding pennies to a bowl containing six somehow altered its number, even if the children couldn't say exactly how.

If numerosity coding is fundamental, it predicts that dyscalculics

struggle to enumerate and manipulate all numbers, large and small.

hopes that, by honing this ability, the Number Sense games will help support his research ideas

“a disaster at arithmetic” and diagnosed him with dyscalculia, a little-known learning disability sometimes called number blindness and likened to dyslexia for maths

Researchers estimate that as much as 7% of the population has dyscalculia, which is marked by severe difficulties in dealing with numbers despite otherwise normal

well above normal) intelligence

he has crusaded to get dyscalculia recognized — by parents, teachers, politicians and anyone who will listen.

Number Sense, a suite of educational computer games

hopes that Number Sense — if it can improve dyscalculia — will help him in the academic debate over the cognitive basis of numeracy.

the interest of the children was to have a fun game full of ideas and variety, and that was not very compatible with an analytic approach