Alberta is living through the strangest curriculum decade in Canadian math education. Kindergarten through Grade 6 switched to a brand-new curriculum in 2022 and 2023. Grades 7 to 9 are still taught from the 2007 Program of Studies, updated in 2016, and its replacement does not become mandatory until September 2027. So an Alberta school is teaching two different math philosophies in the same building, and nearly every math game on the internet is aligned to a third one: the American Common Core, which matches neither.
Full disclosure before anything else: this is Infinilearn's blog, we make the game this post is about, and the reason the post exists is that we just built alignment for both of Alberta's curricula. Judge accordingly.
Why Alberta's sequence breaks American games
The new K to 6 curriculum is genuinely unusual, and mostly in the direction of earlier. Percentages start in Grade 4; no American-aligned game expects that, because Common Core waits until Grade 6. Adding and subtracting fractions with common denominators lands in Grade 5, unlike denominators in Grade 6, and standard algorithms are required by name throughout. A game following the American sequence will quietly skip things your Grade 4 class is actually doing this week.
Then the seam flips the other way. Multiplying and dividing fractions by fractions is not in the new K to 6 at all; under the Program of Studies it arrives in Grade 8. Same for integer arithmetic, which starts in Grade 7. A Common Core game hands Grade 5 students fraction multiplication their teacher has never taught, three years early. Neither direction is a catastrophe, but both are the game telling your students that class and practice are two unrelated worlds.
The Alberta curricula, actually supported
Infinilearn is a free browser-based fantasy RPG for Grades 4 to 9 where every attack in battle fires by solving a real math problem. When a teacher sets a class to the Alberta Curriculum, practice follows Alberta's own grade placement across both texts at once: the new curriculum for Grades 4 to 6, the 2007 (Updated 2016) Program of Studies for Grades 7 to 9. Percent shows up in Grade 4 battles. Fraction multiplication waits for Grade 8. Money computation is there, because the new curriculum put it in math; budgets and interest are not, because Alberta put those in Physical Education and Wellness, and we do not get to overrule Alberta Education.
One detail teachers notice immediately: there are no outcome codes on our dashboards, because Alberta does not publish any. Both curricula are written as prose. So the teacher dashboard shows each skill in the outcome's own wording instead of inventing a numbering system your division has never seen. The coverage view is equally plain about the gaps: we currently cover 89 of the 105 outcomes for Grades 4 to 9, and the dashboard lists every one we do not, so you can check the claim instead of taking it from a blog post written by the vendor.
And the 2027 question, since every Alberta teacher is already tired of hearing about it: when the new 7 to 9 curriculum becomes mandatory in September 2027, we rebuild that half of the alignment. That is a promise with a date on it.
What about everyone else?
- Prodigy. The biggest math RPG in the world is Canadian, and it is a good game for young kids; we say so every time we write about it. But as of September 2026, the curriculum list on Prodigy's own standards page shows Ontario as its Canadian alignment. An Alberta classroom playing it is practising a rewritten American sequence with an Ontario label. If that changes, good; Alberta students would be better off for it.
- IXL. Has genuine Alberta-aligned skill lists, which is a real advantage and worth crediting. It is drill practice with no game layer; kids rate it somewhere between homework and extra homework.
- Khan Academy. Free, excellent, organized by American course structure. The self-driven kid can absolutely use it for Alberta math; the kid who needs to be tricked into practising will not open it twice.
For parents
The curriculum toggle is a classroom setting, so at home the honest advice is simpler: pick your child's actual grade, and the adaptive engine, which tracks accuracy topic by topic and sends more of the weak ones into battles, does the work. The whole game is free with no ads and nothing paywalled in-game; premium (US$9.99 a month, and yes, US dollars, sorry) adds cosmetics and a deeper parent dashboard. Chat is preset phrases only, and it runs in any browser, including on an iPad. If your child's teacher uses Infinilearn with an Alberta-aligned class, everything above applies to their class practice automatically.
Bottom line
Alberta classrooms have spent four years explaining to parents why the math looks different now. The least a math game can do is know which curriculum it is practising. Ours knows both of Alberta's, shows its work in Alberta's own words, and has a calendar reminder set for September 2027.