Sorry, I don't have a decent name for this yet.

My wife picked up a new learning math cartridge for my son's DS last week. I'm not sure why we thought we could trick my son into thinking that a DS cartridge that teaches math would be cooler than the upteenmillion Pokemon games he owns. Predictably, he only played it for the first 10 minutes right after he cracked it open. Once he discovered that there was no shooting or spells or attacks involved, it was never seen again. We got the game mainly to build up his speed in answering questions. He gets stressed out when we time him, so we thought it would be better if the DS took the heat.

But all is not lost. One of the games on this cartridge was a grid that you had to complete. The little Japanese scientist in the game says that all the Japanese kids are doing it. It's the latest fad. The game goes like this...You choose the operation and how many cells you want to fill out and go. It's timed and you can compete with up to 15 other people (As we all know 15 is the magical size limit for all Japanese classrooms and of course all Japanese students are issued a gameboy as soon as they enter preschool). I wanted to impress the Japanese with my skills, so this weekend I created a copy of the grid game matrix thing. It's not quite complete, but is good enough to show.

The limitations are:

1. Only multiplication
2. Not working on Safari or iPod (yet...more below)
2a. Only tested on IE, so Patrick it probably won't work on firefox
3. Timer not yet available - Next, should be pretty easy
4. 15 school children cannot play together (interesting, might add and make it 42 so American classmates can play)
5. Always 100 cells
6. No score or fireworks when you finish, works like flashcards

To play click mathMatrix or click on the picture.

Update: Safari now works. I reworked the game to store the values of the display in an array of numbers. Originally we were trying to manipulate the display cell values. It works on the iPod as well. I'm going to rework the keypad to make the numbers easier to hit on the ipod.

Updated 3/9:fixed the innerText problem with Firefox and added something at the end

In keeping with the spirit and colorful square theme of this site, here is something both nerdy and cubie. If you have an iphone or ipod touch check out cube runner.