What it teaches
Turning a sentence into a sum. That step is the one children find hardest and the one most practice skips, so the numbers here are deliberately easy: a child should fail this game because they picked the wrong operation, never because the arithmetic beat them.
Word problems are also the place where reading and maths meet, and where a child who is good at both can still be stuck because nobody has shown them how to join them.
What to look for
Ask the child to say the story back in their own words before they touch the keypad. Most wrong answers here are a misread, not a miscalculation, and retelling catches it immediately.
Two-step problems arrive at the higher levels. They are a genuine step up, and worth waiting for.