1. What is Lubu?
Lubu is a game designed to help kids learn math. It is simple and fun, but it gets into deeper concepts such as ratios, fractions and how to do addition with two numbers. Through the game we are teaching kids the basic principles of addition and multiplication to get them more comfortable with these concepts. It's also a great way for parents to help their kids learn.
If you enjoy Lubu, please consider buying me some coffee (or something else). Thanks!
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2. Why should I play Lubu with my kids?
It’s not a secret that I don’t believe in video games.
I do believe in the fun part though. I believe they are important to the human life experience, and that they should be enjoyed by everyone from toddlers to senior citizens, from across different cultures and backgrounds. But if we want to really understand why people play games, we need to look beyond the game itself. We need to look at what happens in between the game and the end of the experience — how does it make us feel? How does it affect our moods? What can we learn about ourselves?
In this post, I’d like to introduce you Lubu, a game designed by two Stanford PhD students (Zachary Wicker & Cory Silverberg) that explores these questions through a fun way of exploring math using an abstract mathematical process called “minimax algorithms”. This post is a short introduction with some links (including some new ones) showing how you can play Lubu with your kids.
Lubu is developed as an open-source project maintained by Stanford University and its spinoff company OpenLubu LLC. It has been in development since 2013 (with the first version released in November 2014). It runs on Windows, MacOSX and Linux with various web browsers including Firefox or Chrome, IE or Safari and so on.
The prototype was built entirely on JavaScript; however, there are ports for other platforms such as Android (for example you can use Google Play Services), iOS and OSX too. The goal is to make sure all browsers support it: ideally all major browsers — including Microsoft Edge! — will support it soon!
3. How to play Lubu?
This is a quick post about Lubu. If you’ve never played it, you should check it out. But if you’ve played it already and are looking for a new challenge or just some fun, here’s how to play the fun game that helps children learn math. :)
4. Who is the developer of Lubu?
Lubu is a game that can help kids get better at math. It’s free and easy to install, and is a lot of fun.
There have been quite a few other similar games (e.g. Circus Ponies). The good news about Lubu is that, unlike some of these games, it does not require the user to be sitting at the computer for very long to access the benefits.
This is important because children grow up with technology: they are more likely to use it when they are young than when they are older (which allows them to start playing right away). And, as you know, computers have become increasingly important in daily life, so we should make sure Lubu has the latest technology at its disposal (which means an active development team).
The game itself is very simple: you tap on the screen and you get one of four numbers – a 0, 1 or 2 (or all zeros), 3 or 4 (or all ones), 5 or 6 (or all zeros) — on your screen. This can be done quickly but accurately and with no hinting — which helps newcomers who don’t know how math works do their thing quickly too!
But there’s more to Lubu than that…ok
On the surface it sounds simple enough: the game needs only basic mathematics — multiplication and division — and so it can be played without needing any pre-calculations or math training at all. But if you look closely it turns out that there are actually five elements of Lubu which add up to make it much harder than just being able to multiply two numbers by themselves:
A nice bit of design practice here is showing how adding various types of math operations together helps teach the player different concepts in mathematics: multiplication plus addition (+) multiplication plus subtraction (-) addition (+-) subtraction (--) addition with one variable (+1) subtraction with one variable (-1) addition with two variables (+2) subtraction with two variables (-2) multiplication with two variables (+3) subtraction with two variables (-3). They also compensate for each other! This ties into some great ideas about how well-designed programs should deal with nonlinearities in math coding systems (for example, seeing how Python implements this will give you an idea about how your software should handle such
5. Where can I get Lubu and play it with my children?
I’m a huge fan of the Lubu game, and I’ve played it with my kids for a couple of years now. . It’s fun, and makes you think about math in an interesting way.
I can’t tell you how many times I have played this with my kids (and myself) and each time we have enjoyed it so much that we were shocked when we played it for the first time with our friends. We didn’t know how or why to play it, but one day out of nowhere we figured it out: We represented different math concepts by color and shape.
I won’t go into too much detail here (it would take up too much space), but I will say that one thing that amazed me was how easy it was to come up with other math concepts while playing the game (we went through everything from counting fingers to naming planets).
The lubu - the fun game that helps kids get better at math Lubu - The fun game that helps kids get better at math
6. Conclusion
Lubu, or Math Club, is a multiplayer game that’s been played by millions of schoolchildren since the 1980s. When I was growing up in Seattle, we used to play it at lunchtime. When I was in college and living in Boston, I knew I had to give it a shot.
I and my friends played every day for an entire year until we reached this milestone:
We have 3 players and 20 minutes to complete 40 puzzles (the usual time). We have a map to show where the objects are. The object is to get the highest number of points by arriving at the destination before the timer runs out.
We have a map with colored tiles that represent objects in our 4x4 board: green means you can reach the destination, red means you can’t (you “lose”) and white is “unbroken”, meaning no objects can be reached from any other route on the board. And there are special tiles as well — blue is a water tile (no colors), orange is an air tile (no colors) and yellow says “don’t touch it!” (meaning don’t move anything on that tile).
We start from scratch after each puzzle and each player bets their own turn order when they start their turn. After one minute has passed, players must decide if they want to change their turn order. At this point, players post their scores on the board — either first or last — depending on who won their bet. If someone wins three games in a row then they get all three tiles immediately, but if someone loses three games then they take them back out of play until they win again! This keeps everyone involved because everyone wants to win more than anyone else — but also because everyone wants to take something back out of play as well!
