People have questioned whether dart is a sport, but for British government, dart is at least one branch of Applied Mathematics. During the world professional darts Championships, the British government has called for people to improve their numeracy skills by practicing darts.

The British Continuing Education officer Sion Simon said that there’re 6.8 million British adults basic arithmetic ability is not good enough, and the government is considering incorporating darts into the free arithmetic courses offered to adults to let people relaxed and improve their mathematical ability. Simon said: "you can't play darts without understanding math. If you want to play darts well, you have to be good at arithmetic. We hope this will help people improve their numeracy skills." Former dart champion Bobbi George is also in favor of this. He said: "dart contains 33% of arithmetic, and if you can't count, you can't win."

 

 

The most popular dart rule is the 501 point system, which is named from the game always starts at 501points. Each round of points is subtracted from the total score, and the first one whose points get to 0 point is the winner. More difficult is that the player must hit in the two-time area when he is going to end the game. For example, if there are 59 points left, the dart player will have to hit the area of 19 points, then hit two-time area of 20 points. If you make a mistake, you need to recalculate. If your first hit is in the two-time area of 7 points, you'll need to hit a single partition with 13 points and end up with two-time of the 16 points.

 

George believes that dart does improve people's numeracy skills and it’s more interesting. "In the past 20 years, I used to go to school and find that students love the game. They learn it quickly, and learn much faster than they do on the blackboard." Besides counting, dart can also work in geometry, physics and algebra. Dr. Ken Bray of the University of Bath said: "the dart player may not realize that they also do geometric and physical calculations in combinations of hundreds of throwing." “Pitchers need to be completely stationary, and they have to control the speed, angle, and rotation of the dart," Bray said, "If an angle is biased out of the 1/10, it will wide of a triple area."