Times Tables Racer, a free multiplication game for 2 to 12 times tables
Times Tables Racer is a free racing game that helps children practise multiplication and division facts from the 2 times table up to the 12 times table. Answer quickly to shift up a gear, hold your streak and finish all three laps before the other cars. Fast, accurate recall is what wins the race.
The game suits children in KS1 and KS2, roughly ages 6 to 11, including Year 4 pupils preparing for the Multiplication Tables Check. Every race mixes all the tables from 2 to 12, exactly like the check itself. Choose Multiply, Divide or Mixed questions, then set the difficulty so the computer cars match your child's pace.
Times Tables Racer is one of the free tools from School House Learning Centre, built by an experienced maths teacher. If your child needs more structured help beyond quick recall, our interactive maths mastery lessons teach each topic step by step with worked examples and hundreds of practice questions.
What does the game practise?
Multiplication facts from 2 Ă— 1 up to 12 Ă— 12, plus the matching division facts. Every race draws from all of them at random, so your child cannot settle into one table and coast. Each answer gives instant feedback, and the end screen lists any questions your child got wrong with the correct answers, plus the tables worth practising next.
What age is Times Tables Racer for?
It works well from Year 2 up to Year 6. Younger children can start on Easy, where the computer cars are slow enough to leave real thinking time. Year 4 pupils facing the Multiplication Tables Check can use Mixed questions on Medium or Hard to build the speed the check demands.
How does the racing work?
Your car has ten gears. A fast correct answer shifts you up, a slow one shifts you up less, and a wrong answer or a timeout drops you back down. The computer cars run at a steady pace set by the difficulty, so consistent quick answers are the only way to stay in front.
Does it work on phones and tablets?
Yes. On touch screens the game uses four big answer buttons so the on-screen keyboard never covers the race. On a computer your child can type answers or press the A, B, C and D keys.
Is it free?
Completely free, with no account and no sign up. Personal bests save on your own device, and you can add a nickname to the world leaderboard if you want to compete.
Using a racing game to build real recall
The game is the delivery mechanism, not the point. What is happening underneath is spaced retrieval practice, which is one of the few study methods with strong evidence behind it. The racing just makes a child do it willingly for ten minutes instead of two.
Why a game works when a worksheet does not
Two things separate this from a printed grid of questions. Each answer gets immediate feedback, so a wrong fact is corrected before it sets, and the questions come in random order rather than down a column, so the child cannot coast on the sequence.
The third thing is willingness. A child who does ten minutes cheerfully gets more retrieval practice than one who does five minutes resentfully and spends three of them negotiating.
Speed is a symptom, not a target
It is tempting to chase a faster time. Resist it for the first couple of weeks. Racing before the facts are secure trains guessing, and guessing under time pressure is exactly the habit that produces careless-looking errors in exams.
Accuracy first until it is consistently high. Then let the speed come, because at that point speed genuinely does reflect recall rather than luck.
What to watch while they play
- Which facts cause the crash. It is usually the same four or five every time, and those are the entire job.
- Whether the pause disappears. Correct but slow means not yet learned.
- Whether accuracy falls when they speed up. If it does, the facts are not secure enough to race on yet.
Write down the three or four facts that keep failing and work on those specifically. Four facts is a five minute job. "Times tables" is a term-long project, and children can tell the difference.
Where this fits in a revision plan
For primary and 11+ children, this is core work and worth doing most days. For GCSE students it is a warm up rather than the session: five minutes here, then the actual revision, which should be topics and past paper questions.
If the tables are the actual problem for a GCSE student, and they sometimes are, our divisibility and multiplication rules lesson covers the shortcuts that make large multiplications tractable without full recall.
Questions parents ask
Is a game as good as proper practice?
For retrieval of number facts, yes, and often better because it gets done more often. Retrieval is retrieval whether it is dressed as a race or a worksheet.
What a game cannot do is teach a method. If your child does not understand what multiplication is, no amount of racing will fix that.
My child gets frustrated when they crash. What should I do?
Drop the difficulty and let them win for a few sessions. The point is frequency, and frequency dies the moment the activity feels like failure.
Then narrow it to the specific failing facts rather than the whole set, so success comes back quickly.