Hit the Button Doubles & Halves
Practise doubling and halving with quick-fire questions up to 100. Choose Easy, Medium or Hard and try to beat your score.
Up to 100 — press to start
Doubling and halving practice
Doubling and halving are a shortcut into multiplication and division that children can use long before the formal facts are secure — doubling 23 is far more approachable than 23 × 2 looks on paper, even though they're the same calculation. This game mixes both directions: doubling a number, and halving an even number back down, up to 100.
Why this matters beyond the game
Quick doubling and halving supports mental strategies children use across the curriculum — doubling to multiply by 4 (double, then double again), halving to divide by 4, and estimating answers before checking them with a written method. It's a genuinely transferable skill, not just a standalone fact to memorise.
Doubling and halving bigger numbers mentally
The strategy that works for single digits (just recall it) breaks down once numbers get into the twenties and thirties — that's usually when a specific mental technique needs to be taught explicitly rather than left to "figure it out":
- Split by place value. To double 34: double the 30 (60), double the 4 (8), add them back together (68). This is more reliable than trying to double the whole number in one step once numbers pass about 20.
- Halving an odd number. Halving 17 doesn't give a whole number, so this game only asks for halves of even numbers — but it's worth explaining explicitly to a child why 17 ÷ 2 looks different (8.5, or "8 remainder 1") so it doesn't feel like a broken rule when they meet it elsewhere.
- Doubling as repeated use. Double, then double again is exactly how ×4 is often taught mentally, and double three times is how some children mentally handle ×8 — both of which only work smoothly if the underlying doubling facts are instant, not worked out from scratch each time.
How this connects to the times tables
Doubling and halving aren't a separate skill from times tables — they're the 2× table (and its inverse) applied repeatedly. A child who's genuinely fluent here usually finds the 4× and 8× times tables easier too, since both are just "double" applied two or three times (see the Times Tables page for the full pattern breakdown).