How to use this in the classroom
Place Value Hop is a Mappy-style platformer for place value. Each floor of the tower is a place (thousands, hundreds, tens, ones). Students climb ladders, collect the right digit on each floor to build the target number, and avoid the enemies. Forces explicit thinking about which digit goes in which place.
Year 2–4 place-value introduction
After teaching place value formally, run as a 15-minute station. The physical metaphor of 'climb to the thousands floor and pick up the right digit' embodies the abstract concept in a way verbal explanation often doesn't.
Diagnostic for written numbers
Students who can read 4,237 aloud but pick up the wrong digit on the wrong floor reveal they're treating the number as a string rather than as place-value structure.
Bridge to expanded form
Pair with expanded-form drill — after each round, students write the number they built as 4000 + 200 + 30 + 7. Connects the game's physical structure to the symbolic form.
What it builds
Place-value structure as an explicit concept. Many Year 2–4 students can answer place-value questions correctly when prompted ('what's the value of the 3 in 432?') but lose track when they have to use place value INSIDE a different task. This game embeds place-value reasoning inside an arcade goal.
Common misconceptions it surfaces
- Digit-value mismatch — A student picks up the 3 from the ones floor when they should have picked it up from the tens floor — reveals they're not thinking about how a digit's value depends on its place.
- Zero-as-empty errors — Targets like 405 or 230 reveal students who treat 0 as 'nothing there' rather than 'zero of this place value'. Often the underlying cause of trailing-zero errors elsewhere.
- Largest-first habit — Some students always climb to the thousands floor first regardless of the target. Reveals procedural following vs. attending to the actual target structure.
Differentiation
- Going slower: Start with two-digit targets (tens and ones only) before introducing hundreds and thousands.
- Going faster: Four- and five-digit targets with constrained time. Strong stretch for Year 4–5 students preparing for written algorithm work.
- Extension: After each successful round, students write the number's expanded form on a whiteboard. Connects the physical game state to the formal notation.
Pairs well with
- Expanded Form drill — the same place-value skill in written form
- Decimal Number Line — place value extended into decimals
- All maths games — the full library