Sumburst is on YouTube: Maths Quizzes, Brain Teasers and Learning Videos

We have started putting Sumburst on YouTube, and the channel is live now at youtube.com/@playsumburst.

The short version: quizzes, brain teasers and gamified maths, in the same spirit as the games. If that sounds like your kind of thing, subscribing is the easiest way to catch new ones.

Why a channel at all

The games teach by making a child do the maths. You build three quarters of a pizza slice by slice, you count out change coin by coin. That works because the maths is the thing you are doing rather than a quiz bolted onto a reward.

But there is a kind of maths that video does better than a game, and it is the bit where somebody shows you how they thought about a problem. Watching a method unfold, pausing to have a go yourself, seeing where the trick was hiding. A game cannot easily say here is why that works. A video can.

So the channel is not a trailer reel for the games. It is the other half: quizzes you can play along with, problems worth arguing about at the dinner table, and the reasoning behind the kind of maths that shows up in the arcade.

What is on there now

Five videos so far, and they fall into two kinds.

The quiz series is the backbone. Can You Solve These Problems? Easy, Medium, Hard Levels runs to three episodes, each about ten minutes, and works exactly as it sounds: a problem appears, you get three lettered answers and a few seconds to commit, then the answer. It climbs from easy to hard as it goes, so one video suits a range of ages in the same room. The questions cover the everyday machinery of primary and lower secondary maths, division facts like 18 divided by 6, and order of operations problems like (4 + 2) minus 8, where the brackets are the whole point.

There is also a 5th Grade Math Quiz Challenge in the same shape, built around multiplication and division, with word problems of the four bags with two apples in each kind. That sort of question is worth more than it looks: it is where a child stops doing arithmetic and starts choosing which operation the situation calls for.

The teaching videos are the other kind, and the first one is Learn Fractions with Pizza: Fractions Made Easy for Kids. Three minutes, halves, quarters and eighths, explained on a pizza. It is the same idea the arcade runs on, that a fraction of a pizza is obvious in a way that a fraction on a page is not, which is why it makes such a natural pair with the game below.

Browse all of them on the channel.

Watch one, then play one

The pairing that works best is to watch something and then go and use it while it is fresh.

• Watched the pizza fractions video? Slice Rush puts your child behind a pizza counter where every order is a fraction they have to build slice by slice, then moves on to percentages and giving change.
• Enjoyed the division questions in the quizzes? Element Spellcaster is times tables and division as spellcasting.
• Liked the word problems? Math Diner runs on addition, subtraction and money in a working kitchen.
• Want the same questions under real pressure? Kingdom Math Defender is multiplication and percentages with a castle to hold.

All four are free, run in a browser, and need no download. If you would rather work on paper, the worksheet library covers grades 1 to 12 as printable PDFs with an answer key on every sheet.

Subscribe

New videos land on the channel rather than here, so subscribing is how you hear about them. It also genuinely helps: we are a small team, and early subscribers are what decide whether YouTube shows a new channel to anyone at all.

Subscribe to Sumburst on YouTube, and tell us what you want covered. If your child is stuck on something specific, that is exactly the sort of thing we want to make a video about, so leave it in the comments.