My name is Robert. If you’ve discovered this web site, you may wonder … why did I bother to create it? What need is being fulfilled?

As a parent who wishes to encourage success at school for my two children, I found math practice to be a weak link in their school work.

What I noticed was a lack of practice time during the school day. The basics (and I mean the true basics) of adding, subtracting, multiplying and division were always hard to practice. I recall the trauma of flash cards and that was in my own home!

It seemed to me that with easy access to computing technology, we should have websites that allow drills of the ultra basics.

But, I was unsatisfied with both paid and free sites and found myself printing out practice sheets. The obvious problem with those is marking them and timing how long it took someone to do the practice sheets. No one does this. However, these devices called computers love counting and repeating and counting and repeating. So, why not make my own site if I’m not happy?

As I thought about how to keep the site concept simple, I encountered some tweets from a teachers’ union/federation where they discussed “computational fluency”. “Say what?” I thought. I did some research and learned that computational fluency is the intersection between understanding the concepts behind the arithmetic you are doing and being able to do that arithmetic in your head quickly and accurately. I knew it as “mental arithmetic” when I was young.

To my amusement no one had thought to reserve the domain name computationalfluency.com. So I did.

However, in all honesty, my interest here is the practice side of computational fluency. People far more qualified and talented than me should be doing the teaching of the concepts. Mental math really in the end is all adding. 2+2=4. Subtraction is unadding. 8-4=4. Multiplication is a shortcut for adding. People using this site should already understand the benefit of memorizing that 7×7=49. Doing 7+7+7+7+7+7+7 all the time is boring. Division of course is the shortcut for unadding. 7/7=1 because you can only share 7 cookies with 7 people once. In my view making sure the concepts are clear is a personal interaction and not done well by computers.

However, for the boring job of math fact practice we should bring in computers. That’s where this site can help anyone of any age (as long as you can use a keyboard or mobile input device).

Computational Fluency means you don’t waste time counting on your fingers and toes. You just know it.

So assuming you grasp why 6×7=42, then it’s time to increase your speed and accuracy through practice. This site lets you compete with the only person that matters: you.

Give the site a go and let me know what you think in the comments section.