🔢 Jack's Numbers

Count, add and subtract with footballs — to 10, then to 20

What this is

An early-years maths game — counting, addition and subtraction, first to 10 and then to 20. Every sum is shown as countable objects before it is shown as arithmetic: the footballs are there to be tapped one at a time, and each tap counts out loud and marks the ball with its number. The abstract sum sits above them; the concrete quantity sits underneath.

Above ten, the balls are laid out five to a row with a break after the tenth — the ten-frame representation used in Year 1 classrooms, which makes bridging ten something a child can see rather than something they have to calculate.

🎮 How to play

1️⃣   Look at the footballs ⚽⚽⚽

The sum is made of real objects.

2️⃣   Touch them to count 👆

Each tap says one, two, three… and numbers the ball. Reaching the end clears the marks so the same set can be counted again.

3️⃣   Pick the answer 🟨🟩🟦🟪

Four coloured tiles, one of them right.

⚽   GOAL!

A correct tile wins a football. A wrong one wobbles and the question is repeated — nothing is lost and there is no timer.

📈 It grows with the child

🐣 To 10	counting 1–10, addition and subtraction within 10
🚀 To 20	switched on with ⚙ — counting to 20, addition bridging ten (8 + 8, 9 + 7), subtraction inside twenty (17 − 5)

Turning the bigger range on adds levels after the existing ones rather than replacing them, so nothing a child has already mastered suddenly gets harder.

⚽⚽⚽⚽⚽      twelve reads as
⚽⚽⚽⚽⚽      ten and two,
              not as a heap
⚽⚽

🎯 What it practises

• 🔢   One-to-one counting of visible objects
• ➕   Addition across the ten boundary
• ➖   Subtraction within twenty
• 🧠   Reading a quantity from a ten frame at a glance

🎈 The other games

Game	What it is
📖 Jack's Words	Hear a word, build it from letter tiles, then read it in a sentence	▶ play
🥅 Jack's Match	Tell real words from decodable nonsense words, then spell by ear	▶ play
✏️ Jack's Letters	Finger-trace all 26 lowercase letters in the correct stroke order	▶ play
🔢 Jack's Numbers	Count, add and subtract with footballs — to 10, then to 20	▶ play 👈 this one
💯 Jack's Big Numbers	Tens and ones, adding and taking away all the way to 100	▶ play
🍎 Jack's Apples	Trace 1–20, then fill the missing numbers into the apple grid	▶ play
👀 Jack's Sight Words	The twenty most common English words on big cards — tap one and hear it read out	▶ play
♟️ Jackies Schach	Full FIDE rules with a coach that marks the safe squares (German)	▶ play

All eight on one start page: jackbenn.ing

🛠 Built like this

Every game in this organisation is one self-contained index.html — no build step, no framework, no package manager, no analytics, and no network calls once the page has loaded. That is a deliberate constraint: a game a child depends on should still work in five years, and a parent should be able to read the whole thing in one sitting.

• Speech — the browser's Web Speech API, preferring a British English voice. It always waits for a tap first, because Chrome and iOS block audio without user activation.
• Progress — kept in localStorage on the device. Nothing is collected, sent or stored anywhere else.
• Made for an iPad mini in either orientation: finger-sized targets, no hover-only interactions, prefers-reduced-motion respected.

Run it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8000

The start page at jackbenn.ing is built from google814/Jack, which is the source of truth. The repos in this organisation are copies kept in step by tools/sync-game-repos.sh in that repo, so each game also has its own page and its own link.