Mental Maths Blast: 60-Second Timed Practice for GCSE and IGCSE

How to run it as a maths starter on the board

Switch to Projector, put it on the board and pick a deck that matches yesterday's lesson. Nobody types: each question stays up for the seconds you chose, then the next one takes its place, and the class writes their answers on paper or on a printed grid. Ten questions at twenty seconds each is the default. When the last one goes, the screen lists every question asked, numbered, with its answer, and the class marks together. Pause with the space bar if a hand goes up; press Enter to move on early when everyone has finished. Press Start and it fills the screen; the Full screen button, or F, takes you back if you leave it, and Change deck on the answers screen gives the page back.

The questions are generated fresh every run, so the same deck can be used on Monday and Friday without anybody recognising a single question, and the answers are worked out from the numbers in the question rather than looked up, so the answer and the question can never disagree.

To set a deck as homework, press it and then press Copy link for your class, next to Start. Anyone who opens the link lands on a Start button with the deck and the time already chosen, plays solo, and is marked as they go.

What the mental maths decks cover

Eleven decks, drawn from the same question engine as the Question Projector and the practice rooms on every topic page. Foundation decks cover order of operations, rounding, ratio, metric units, percentages, fractions, sequences, averages and spread, polygon angles and compound measures. Higher decks add index laws, fractional and negative powers, expanding and factorising quadratics, and surds. The mixed deck shuffles the lot.

Nothing is stored about anyone. Your personal best is kept in your own browser and never leaves it, so the page needs no login and no account. Every deck's skill has a topic page with a worked example and a practice room on IGCSE maths practice by topic.

The other maths starters on this page

The menu at the top of the console groups the starters the way a teacher thinks of them. Mental arithmetic: the Blast, the relay (the Blast with the deck changing every ten seconds and the score your longest streak), the Countdown numbers game on its own page, which is bigger (two values, one press: the arrows or S for the same) and estimate it (round every number to one significant figure and work it out). Reasoning and puzzles: number pyramids on their own page, spot the mistake (three lines of working, one of them wrong: press its number) and four in a row (a grid of twenty-five answers, two teams, the first to call the right cell claims it). Every one runs solo, marked as you go, or on the board with nobody typing, and each has a Copy link for your class button on its description screen.

Answers, and how they are marked

Type answers the way you would write them. Powers use ^, so x^2+5x+6; fractions use a slash, so 3/4; surds accept either 2sqrt3 or 2√3, and the button beside the box types the square root for you. Ratios use a colon, so 4:3. If an answer is marked wrong the correct one appears straight away, and again at the end.