Number Express: A Digital Game to Improve Early Numeracy

Number Express is a digital game designed to build early numeracy in pre-school and primary children, with a particular focus on number ordering, a skill that prior research links to later mathematical achievement. The paper describes the game's conceptual design and initial usability planning rather than reporting intervention outcomes. Players fill a six-carriage train with numbers in the correct sequence, progressing through 118 levels that move from small to larger number ranges and from counting in ones to counting in twos, fives, and tens. The game adapts difficulty to individual performance, offers a two-stage feedback system that culminates in a number line, and awards virtual coins that children can spend in a shop, which also gives incidental practice with money calculations.

The design draws on literature about how children learn cardinal and ordinal number relations, the spatial role of the number line, and Malone's framework for intrinsic motivation through challenge, fantasy, and curiosity. Level structure and starting points are aligned with the UK Early Years Foundation Stage and Year 1 mathematics expectations. Initial feedback from academic colleagues, a primary teacher, and an educational consultant was described as very positive, and it prompted changes such as allowing players to select a starting point and presenting larger number intervals before decade-crossing tasks.

The authors' planned evaluation has three stages: a usability pilot with children aged four to six, assessed through an observation checklist covering learnability, efficiency, errors, and efficacy, plus a short satisfaction questionnaire; a subsequent randomised controlled trial to test effects on numeracy skills; and continued iterative refinement. The paper is therefore a design and protocol report, and its claims about educational effectiveness remain untested at the time of publication.