Cool Math Games: Our Online Childhood
Students playing Fireboy and Watergirl on Cool Math Games (Esmond Hoang / The Puma Prensa
By Esmond Hoang, Staff Writer
Think back to your middle and elementary school days. You’re in class and your teacher gives everyone computer time. So you grab one of those bulky Chromebooks and sit next to your buddy. You two, hunched over, begin to play Fireboy and Watergirl on Cool Math Games.
For those who may not have grown up with Cool Math Games, it’s a kid-friendly online space to play games. The games can range from owning your own lemonade stand to running through space. It's a simple and free way for kids to test out their own brains as a fun pastime. Almost every game is licensed and created by an independent developer.
A current sophomore, Sydney Bailey, reminiscing about Fireboy and Watergirl, recounted, “I loved playing it with my friends, dude like genuinely I have so many memories from that.”
The website originated in 1997 with the help of a math teacher known only as Karen, who wanted a place for students to have fun with math. The site was full of educational tools with neon artwork that was all made by Karen. She even made other websites focusing on financial and mental health help. In her bio from the Cool Math Games, she wrote, “I made these websites so you don’t have to suffer like I did.” Eventually the website evolved to host a wider range of games, and the educational past and retro look was partially lost.
Although Cool Math Games is a staple for early internet experiences, it’s dying.
There are a plethora of reasons for this. One reason is that schools have been targeting the site by blocking it. For Maria Carrillo High School, it’s currently playable, but many schools have blocked it. This doesn't protect the students because they can easily seek different websites which could be unsafe. Vulgar ads and content that are not age-appropriate could easily slip through on other sites, and the school could take years to block them, and by that point another one pops up.
To put it simply, online spaces like these don’t exist anymore, ever since the gaming engine called Adobe Flash Player closed in 2020. This marked an end of era; simple Flash games like Club Penguin or the ones on Cartoon Network are gone. During this time, many of Cool Math Games' most popular older games were gone. They were able to bring these games back though and even modernize the website, but the damage is still there.
The Google searches for Cool Math Games are on average lower than in the early 2010s. According to Semrush, the monthly visits have been on a downward trend in the last six months. This isn’t good for a website that primarily is used during the school year.
Despite this, Cool Math Games is still beloved.
Even though so many of these online playgrounds are dead, Cool Math Games still survives as a time capsule for over a thousand games. In fact, next year it will celebrate its thirty year anniversary. The team behind Cool Math Games does still work to stay relevant by using social media. Often they will find something funny and then post a Cool Math Games version of it. After Flash was shut down, the site had a bit of a resurgence because people were afraid that Cool Math Game would follow too. The future of the website is unknown, but many people hold memories of Cool Math Games with them as a pillar of their childhood.