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Animal Safari Math

A timed addition-and-subtraction game built for one child who liked animals more than arithmetic.

Adaptive difficulty · Timed arithmetic · Playable web app

Animal Safari Math level-select interface

Archived build log

The useful part of the experiment.

01

The itch

Built for one specific kid who liked animals a great deal more than arithmetic.

The bet: if the answer is held by something worth looking at, the arithmetic stops being the point of the screen and becomes the way through it.

02

The build

Tap the animal holding the right answer, race the clock, move on. Addition and subtraction, a safari, and a timer.

Difficulty follows the player silently — no settings screen, no "choose your level". The game watches how fast the answers come and adjusts.

03

The surprise

The timer is load-bearing, and I nearly cut it. Without one there's no reason to answer quickly, and speed is what turns recall into fluency. Set it too tight and a kid stops playing entirely. Almost all the tuning went into that single number, which I had assumed would be an afterthought.

04

What's next

Staying an experiment. It does one thing, and it didn't need to become a product to have been worth building.