Google "maths games for year 7" from Melbourne and you will mostly get pages written for American 7th graders, by American companies, about American standards. Some of them are good pages. None of them will tell you whether "7th grade" is your kid's year level (it is, near enough), whether the content matches what an Australian classroom teaches (mostly), or whether any of it maps to the Australian Curriculum (almost never). This post is the version of that list written for Australian families, year levels and all.
One disclosure up front: this is Infinilearn's blog. We make a free maths RPG, it appears below, and we have a specific reason to care about Australia that we will get to. Read the recommendation paragraphs with that in mind.
First, the conversion problem
Australia is the easy case. American grades and Australian year levels line up almost one to one at these ages, so when an American site says "4th grade", read "Year 4" and you are close enough. State cutoff dates shift things by a few months either way (a Queensland Year 4 and a NSW Year 4 are not born in quite the same window), so when in doubt, match by your child's age rather than the label.
| Australian year | Age | US grade |
|---|---|---|
| Year 4 | 9 to 10 | 4th grade |
| Year 5 | 10 to 11 | 5th grade |
| Year 6 | 11 to 12 | 6th grade |
| Year 7 | 12 to 13 | 7th grade |
| Year 8 | 13 to 14 | 8th grade |
| Year 9 | 14 to 15 | 9th grade |
The deeper question is whether the maths itself matches, and at these year levels the answer is: more than you would expect. Fractions, ratios, integers, linear equations, area and volume, probability; the ladder of topics is close to universal, and the differences are mostly about which year a topic lands in, not whether it exists. An American game will not use the phrase "Australian Curriculum", but the problems your Year 7 kid needs reps on are the same problems.
Why we care about Australia specifically
Here is the disclosure paying off: Infinilearn actually ships an Australian Curriculum mode. It is a free browser-based fantasy RPG for the Year 4 to Year 9 band where every attack, spell, and boss fight fires by solving a real maths problem, and when a teacher sets up a class they can choose the Australian Curriculum as the standards path instead of the American ones. Students then practise the topics as your curriculum organises them. For families playing at home, pick the year level using the table above and the adaptive engine does the rest; it tracks accuracy topic by topic and quietly sends more of the shaky topics into battles.
The parts parents usually want to know: the entire game is free, there are no ads, and nothing is paywalled. Premium (US$9.99 a month, priced in US dollars) buys cosmetic extras and a deeper parent dashboard, and a free player has the whole game. Multiplayer chat is preset phrases only, so nobody is typing anything to your child. It runs in any modern browser, including Safari on an iPad, with nothing to install. The honest cons: it speaks American by default (it will say "grade" at you), problems are multiple choice, and there is no phone app yet.
A word about NAPLAN
Every second maths product in Australia sells itself as NAPLAN preparation, so let us be straight about what a game can and cannot do. NAPLAN numeracy, sat in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, is a test of whether the underlying skills are there; it is not a genre you can cram for the way you cram spelling words. The useful preparation is boring and unglamorous: lots of reps on the specific topics where your child is weak, spread over months. That happens to be the one thing a good adaptive game is built to deliver, because it finds the weak topics without you having to, and because a kid will do forty problems inside a boss fight who would riot at a forty-problem worksheet. Buy "NAPLAN prep" workbooks if they calm your nerves in March. The reps are what move the number.
What else is on the menu
An honest tour of what Australian families actually use, from a competitor, so calibrate accordingly:
- Mathletics. The Sydney-born school staple; there is a decent chance your child's school already has it. Solid curriculum-aligned practice with a competitive live-maths layer. It is practice software with game elements rather than a game, and the home version is a paid subscription, but it is properly aligned to Australian classrooms in a way almost nothing else is.
- Prodigy. The big fantasy maths RPG, covering roughly Years 1 to 8 with a distinctly primary-school centre of gravity. Free to play, though the pets and gear that motivate kids sit behind a paid membership. If your child is in Year 2 or 3 and too young for us, this is the obvious pick; we wrote a whole guide for families whose kids have outgrown it.
- Khan Academy. Free, completely American, and covers everything, but maths is maths and the videos are excellent. Not a game in any sense; a motivated Year 9 student can do a lot here, and an unmotivated one will not open it twice.
- Matific. Primary-focused activity software used in plenty of Australian schools. Well designed for the younger years; your Year 8 will consider it beneath their dignity.
Play through January
One purely Australian note to end on. The research on the "summer slide" (kids forgetting a chunk of the year's maths over the long break) is American, but the effect does not check passports; it just happens over Christmas here instead of July. The six weeks of the summer holidays are exactly when a maths game earns its keep, because it is the one form of practice that does not require a parent to run a lesson in January. Twenty minutes of questing a few times a week is enough to keep the machinery warm for the first week of Term 1.