The Roots of Life Guide

For those of you who are wondering, The Roots Of Life isn't a game about the origins of life or something deep like that. It's just a simple math game that's been built from the ground up to hone your kid's skills in finding the square root of different numbers, and it's good at giving your brain that refresher course once in a while. Just in case you have forgotten what square root is, here's a simple definition: the square of a number is a number which, when multiplied by itself, results to the original number. If that sounds vague to you, here are some examples: the square root of 16 is 4 since 4 multiplied by 4 results to 16. Another example: let's take 36. The square root of this number is 6 since 6 multiplied by 6 equals 36. Simple and easy, isn't it?

Now, there are some special rules you will encounter... one, for example, that a square root of a positive number is both a positive and negative number (positive multiplied by positive is positive, and negative multiplied negative equals positive). BUT let's not bother ourselves with that as we won't encounter such cases in this math game. OK moving back to The Roots Of Life, the objective is very straightforward: find the square root of a given number. Just that, nothing complicated or fancy.

When you start the game, you get to pick a difficulty - easy, medium, and hard. If your child is still developing his math skills, I'd recommend you guys stick with the easy and medium mode for the time being. HOWEVER, if you think you or your child is good enough to find square roots of 4-digit numbers, by all means, click the hard mode and dig in. You can even enter the contest mode where you get to record your score and see how you stack up against the leaders in the scoreboards.

For every question, that board-carrying moose on the left side will show a number. 4 clouds with numbers on them will appear and one of them has the square root of the given number. Just click on the right answer and that's it! Rinse and repeat until you beat the level. The more correct answers you make, the stronger the tree grows and the HIGHER you score. You want to keep your mistakes down. Making a mistake doesn't result to anything scary. Making your second mistake, though, will make your tree wobbly. And if you make a third, it's game over! You have to start from square one.

A Trick For Beating The Hard Level: Being essentially a multiple choice type of quiz, I've got some tips and tricks for beating the hard level in this math game. Let's say you are given this number: 1369. Can you find the square root of that number? Here are the options to choose from: 39, 37, 38, and 34. Given time, you should be able to get the answer... perhaps with the help of a pen and paper.

Look at the last digit of the given number, which is 9 for the given example. Here's the trick: sometimes, all you have to do is multiply the last digits of the numbers to choose from and see if the last digit of the product is equal to the last digit of the original number (1369 in our example). From the 4 numbers given as choices, 37 (7 multiplied by 7 is 49) fits the bill! And VIOLA! 37 is the correct answer. You can check out your calculator if you don't believe me. Sometimes, however, there are two options fit the criteria given. If that happens, it's time to roll up your sleeves and do some longer calculation. Though you can just guess (there's a 50/50 chance), I wouldn't risk it if I were you.