What an eight-year-old is working on
Multiplication and division that arrive without counting, because everything after them assumes it. Word problems, where the difficulty is choosing the operation rather than performing it. Money and change, which is the arithmetic adults actually use. And reading comprehension โ getting information out of a sentence, not just off the page.
The tables are the job
There are a hundred facts and a child of eight usually knows ninety-five of them. The remaining five are almost always in the six, seven and eight tables, and the parent screen names them. Those five facts are the whole task; the other ninety-five are practice a child does not need.
Where games stop being enough
At this age the useful thing is the conversation after a wrong answer, not the next round. The review screen lists the exact facts being missed, and going through four of them out loud together beats twenty more minutes of tapping.