Playing together to think better: cooperative games in mathematics education

Cooperative games represent a powerful tool for mathematics education. By integrating cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions, they address key challenges such as disengagement, anxiety, and limited opportunities for mathematical discussion and interaction. This contribution presents two curriculum-oriented cooperative board games, designed to target common student difficulties and conceived as instructional tools for use within regular classroom practice. The games are characterized by a high degree of design flexibility, enabling adaptation to different mathematical topics, levels of complexity, and even to other subject areas or cross-curricular themes.