The Speak & Maths, from Texas Instruments, was the follow up to the amazing Speak & Spell. It was the same shape but a silver, orange and blue theme.

As with the Speak & Spell, it would ask you questions of varying difficulty based on the mode you selected and you keyed in the answer. If you were correct it would congratulate you, whereas if you were wrong it would let you know in no uncertain terms that you had made a mistake.

The game modes were:

Word Problems, in which it would ask you five mental arithmetic questions,

Greater/Less in which it gave you two numbers and you had to select whether the second number was greater than or less than the first,

Write It where it said numbers out loud for you to type in,

Number Stumper which was a variation on Mastermind in which it thought of a number sequence and you had to guess the numbers it was thinking of.

This latter game was my favourite because it wasn’t “maths” as such.

On the easiest setting, Number Stumper thought of a two digit number. You had to key in different two number combinations and it would tell you if either of the numbers you had keyed in were correct and if they were in the correct place. If you keyed in “45” and it said “Numbers right:1, Numbers in wrong place:1”, then you keyed in “46” and it said “Numbers right:1, Numbers in wrong place:1”, you pretty much knew that the 4 was correct but it was in the wrong place.

So then you could start guessing two digit numbers that ended in 4 rather than started with it.

This may not sound THAT interesting, but I spent weeks upon weeks playing it.

Another 80s win for the mighty Texas Instruments.