Virtual Math Manipulatives

The Best Free Virtual Math Manipulatives All on One Page!

Effective math teachers give their students plenty of opportunities to explore math concepts through the use of math manipulatives—objects that are designed to aid a student in comprehending mathematical concepts by manipulating, handling, or even playing with it. Math manipulative can include counting cubes, geoboards, marbles, fraction strips, number frames and more.

Why? Because visual and hands-on math activities that promote exploration improve student performance. In fact, according to Stanford Professor and Math Education Expert, Jo Boaler, visual mathematics is an important part of mathematics for its own sake and new brain research tells us that visual [and hands-on] mathematics helps students learn numerical mathematics.

When you give students opportunities to play with and explore difficult math concepts including fractions, decimals, area models, and probability, they are better able to make develop a deep understand and comprehension that is not reliant on rote memorization. When it comes to using manipulatives, most teachers opt to use physical objects that students can manipulate while sitting at a desk in a classroom—and there are hundreds of amazing activities and applications like building fraction kits out of construction paper, using playing cards to explore mean, median, and mode, and exploring area and perimeter using cheez-its to name a few.

And while physical manipulatives are a great tool, they also have many limitations. Students have to be present in the classroom to use physical manipulatives and they can also be expensive and difficult to maintain. However, with the prevalence of students having access to computers, remote learning, and a growing push for more technology in the classroom, more and more websites are offering free (an amazingly useful) virtual math manipulatives that students can use on computers, tablets, and even smart phones.

It is important to note that virtual manipulatives often provide the exact same benefit of physical manipulatives in that they give students unique opportunities to explore challenging math concepts by manipulating through some form of manipulation, handling, or play.

If you are looking for awesome virtual manipulatives for math, there are currently dozens of websites sharing free virtual math manipulatives for topics typically covered in grades K-8 ranging from basic arithmetic to fractions and decimals to probability to algebra. To save you tons of time sorting through many websites to find the best virtual math manipulatives, we have compiled what is, in our opinion, the best free virtual math manipulatives, all of which are accessible via the links below.

Each virtual math manipulative includes a preview image along with a reference to the website source and a link to explore that site’s other math manipulatives. Simply click on the image preview to be redirected to the website to start using that virtual manipulative for math learning.

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Did we miss your favorite virtual math manipulative? Please contact us with a link and description so we can check it out and add it to our recommendation list.