It was developed and published by Creative Publications and was initially adopted by the U.S. state of California and schools run by the US Department of Defense by the mid 1990s.
Unlike curricula such as Investigations in Numbers, Data, and Space, by 2007 Mathland was no longer offered by the publisher, and has since been dropped by many early adopters.
Children meet in small groups and invent their own ways to add, subtract, multiply and divide, which spares young learners from "teacher-imposed rules."
Instead, the curriculum guide explains that "division in MathLand is not a separate operation to master, but rather a combination of successive approximations, multiplication, adding up and subtracting back, all held together with the students' own number sense."
Debra J. Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle calls Mathland a math curriculum that prefers not to give lessons with "predetermined numerical results."
[4] In a letter published in Stars and Stripes concerning the education of children by the Department of Defense, Denise McArthur wrote that "according to Dr. Wu, mathematics professor at U.C.