A day in the life of a person with dyscalculia: a series of games

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dyscalculia is a learning disorder affecting numbers and mathematics, and it concerns roughly 5 to 10% of children worldwide. People with dyscalculia may struggle to grasp the concept of number and the relations between numbers, to memorize arithmetic facts, to carry out calculations, and to handle everyday situations involving numbers.

To help people understand what that actually feels like, our team has designed a series of six short games that follow a single day, from waking up to the afternoon snack. Each one turns an ordinary daily activity into the kind of effortful puzzle that numbers can become for someone with dyscalculia:

Waking up — the clock game
Getting dressed — the sock game
Breakfast — mystery words
Leaving for school — find your way
A day at school — the battle game
Snack time — the coin game

Each game comes with two pages of instructions: one for parents, explaining the rules and why the game is relevant to dyscalculia, and one for children, setting out the key points.

An important caveat, which we state in the booklet itself: people with dyscalculia do not literally perceive the world the way these games depict it. The games are meant to illustrate the additional mental effort required to make sense of certain mathematical concepts, not to simulate the disorder.

The booklet was created by members of the Brain, Behavior and Learning team at the CRNL — Lise Viallet, Aurélie Lafaix, Charlotte Constant-Varlet, Jérôme Prado, Honorine Bouchet and Tatum Holley.

Download the games (PDF, in French)

Dyscalculia | Brain, Behavior, and Learning Lab

A day in the life of a person with dyscalculia: a series of games