NEWS

NESODDTANGEN, Norway — In a sun-drenched classroom a few miles south of Oslo, Jean-Baptiste Huynh stood in front of a class of rapt first-graders who watched as he played a video game.

A teacher and game designer, Huynh was showing off his new Dragonbox Numbers, in which the digits 1 through 10 appear as different-sized creatures who can “eat” one another. The resulting creature represents the sum of the two. After a brief lesson, Huynh set the students free. They scrambled back to their desks and their school-issued tablet computers and got to work.

It was mid-October, and Dragonbox Numbers had yet to be released on Apple’s iTunes Store, either here or anywhere else. These 3-foot-tall beta testers were among the first in the world to try it.