Multipli is a mobile game built by Caixa Mágica Software in partnership with Alfiii that teaches multiplication tables to children aged 7 to 12 through competitive play. The core mechanic works in reverse: instead of being given a multiplication and asked for the result, players are given a result and asked to find the multiplication that produces it. That inversion is what makes Multipli different from a standard drill app.
The game includes individual practice modes, mini-tournaments, and a national championship that brings schools across Portugal into direct competition. Behind the scenes, a custom back office lets administrators manage users, championships, and content without touching the underlying code.
Multipli Challenge: Making Multiplication Tables Worth Playing
The problem with traditional drilling
Multiplication tables are one of the first serious memorisation challenges children face in school. The standard approach, repetition through drills, works for some children and fails others. Drills are passive. They require a child to sit still, repeat answers, and stay motivated through a process that offers no reward beyond getting the right answer.
For children who do not respond well to passive repetition, the result is disengagement. They get the answers wrong, lose confidence, and come to associate multiplication tables with frustration rather than mastery. By the time they move on to more complex maths, they are carrying a gap that only gets harder to close.
The challenge Alfiii brought to Caixa Mágica was precise: build something that makes practising multiplication tables genuinely compelling for a 7 to 12 year old. Not just tolerable. Not just slightly more fun than a worksheet. Actually worth picking up and playing.
Why games work for this age group
Children in the 7 to 12 age range are already spending significant time with mobile games. They understand game mechanics intuitively: lives, scores, levels, opponents, prizes. These are motivational structures that drills simply do not have.
A game built around multiplication tables can use those same structures. Correct answers advance the game. Speed matters. Competing against other players adds stakes that solo practice cannot replicate. Winning a tournament in front of your school is a different experience from getting a tick on a worksheet.
In practice, the challenge was not just to add a game layer on top of a drill. It was to design a game where the multiplication logic is central to the play experience, not an obstacle between the player and the fun part.
Building Multipli
The reverse multiplication mechanic
Multipli’s defining feature is its reverse approach to multiplication tables. Standard apps present a multiplication: 7 x 8 = ? Multipli presents the answer and asks for the factors: ? x ? = 56. This demands a different kind of thinking. Players cannot rely purely on rote recall. They need to reason about the relationships between numbers to find valid factor pairs.
In practice, this makes the game harder to game through memorisation alone. A child who has learned the answer to every standard multiplication still needs to think when presented with a result and asked to work backwards. That cognitive demand is what builds genuine understanding rather than surface-level recall.
The difficulty scales across levels, keeping the challenge appropriate as players improve. Early levels use smaller numbers with fewer possible factor combinations. Later levels introduce larger numbers where multiple valid factor pairs exist, requiring players to consider options rather than identifying a single correct answer.
Multipli game modes
Multipli offers several modes designed to serve different contexts and motivations.
Individual practice lets players work through multiplication tables at their own pace, with difficulty levels they can adjust as their confidence grows. This mode is useful for homework and independent study, where the goal is personal improvement rather than competition.
Jumpli is one of the more unusual modes. Players respond to multiplication challenges through physical actions rather than screen taps. This brings a physical dimension to what is normally a sedentary activity, which is particularly relevant for younger children who find sustained screen-based concentration difficult.
Mini-tournaments let groups of players compete directly against each other over a short period. Schools can run these internally, creating class or year-group competitions that give the game a social dimension. Winning a mini-tournament means something when your classmates are watching.
Multipli game modes
Multipli offers several modes designed to serve different contexts and motivations.
Individual practice lets players work through multiplication tables at their own pace, with difficulty levels they can adjust as their confidence grows. This mode is useful for homework and independent study, where the goal is personal improvement rather than competition.
Jumpli is one of the more unusual modes. Players respond to multiplication challenges through physical actions rather than screen taps. This brings a physical dimension to what is normally a sedentary activity, which is particularly relevant for younger children who find sustained screen-based concentration difficult.
Mini-tournaments let groups of players compete directly against each other over a short period. Schools can run these internally, creating class or year-group competitions that give the game a social dimension. Winning a mini-tournament means something when your classmates are watching.
Multipli game modes
Multipli offers several modes designed to serve different contexts and motivations.
Individual practice lets players work through multiplication tables at their own pace, with difficulty levels they can adjust as their confidence grows. This mode is useful for homework and independent study, where the goal is personal improvement rather than competition.
Jumpli is one of the more unusual modes. Players respond to multiplication challenges through physical actions rather than screen taps. This brings a physical dimension to what is normally a sedentary activity, which is particularly relevant for younger children who find sustained screen-based concentration difficult.
Mini-tournaments let groups of players compete directly against each other over a short period. Schools can run these internally, creating class or year-group competitions that give the game a social dimension. Winning a mini-tournament means something when your classmates are watching.
The Multipli National Championship
The national championship is the highest-stakes mode in Multipli. Schools across Portugal enter their best players, who compete through a structured elimination format. The championship runs annually, with prizes for the top performers.
For the schools involved, the national championship turns multiplication table practice into something with genuine external stakes. A child preparing for the championship has a reason to practise that goes beyond classroom requirements. The competitive structure creates motivation that persists outside school hours, which is when most voluntary practice happens.
For Alfiii, the national championship serves as the centrepiece of the product’s identity. Multipli is not just an app children use in class. It is a platform that produces a national event with real winners and real prizes. That distinction is what sets it apart from the dozens of educational maths apps that exist without any competitive infrastructure behind them.
Back office for schools and administrators
Multipli was built using Unity for the game interface and experience. Unity is the standard choice for mobile game development because it handles cross-platform deployment efficiently and provides the tools needed for responsive, visually consistent gameplay across different devices.
The back end runs on .NET with MySQL for database management. A Linux infrastructure supports the platform. This combination gives the system the reliability needed to handle simultaneous connections during tournament periods, when many players may be active at the same time.
Multipli Impact: Games, Schools, and Maths Education
A different relationship with multiplication tables
The most direct measure of Multipli’s impact is what happens when children play it voluntarily. An educational tool that children only use when required has limited reach. One they choose to open outside school hours, because they want to beat their score or prepare for a tournament, reaches them in a completely different way.
Multipli’s competitive structure is what drives that voluntary engagement. Mini-tournaments create social stakes at the class level. The national championship creates stakes at a national level. Children who are motivated to compete practise more than those who are simply assigned exercises. More practice means faster recall, which means greater confidence in maths more broadly.
Schools and teachers as active participants
Multipli’s design explicitly includes schools and teachers as active participants rather than passive recipients. Teachers can set up tournaments for their class, track individual progress through the back office, and use the competitive events as structured classroom activities.
In practice, this means Multipli fits into existing teaching practice rather than requiring teachers to adopt a completely new approach. A teacher who runs a class mini-tournament is doing something familiar: setting up a structured activity with clear rules and visible outcomes. The fact that it runs on a mobile app rather than paper does not change the fundamental dynamic.
The national championship takes this further. Schools that enter are committing to a structured process that spans weeks and involves multiple rounds of competition. That level of institutional participation signals something beyond casual adoption.
Multipli and mathematics education in Portugal
Portugal, like most countries, treats multiplication table fluency as a foundational skill. Children who do not achieve it early struggle with more advanced topics that build on it: long division, fractions, algebra. The earlier the gap is addressed, the less it compounds.
Multipli addresses this at scale. By making multiplication practice competitive and social, it reaches children who would not voluntarily engage with traditional drilling. As a result, the children who most need additional practice, those who find passive repetition demotivating, are also the ones most likely to be drawn in by the game’s competitive structure.
The national championship, in particular, creates a annual moment where multiplication table fluency is publicly valued and rewarded. That cultural signal matters. Children respond to what their environment treats as worth caring about.
