Well, you may have guessed the answer to that question: yes they can. The game is called Tower Math, and it’s just come out for iOS and Android.

The game is the work of developer Freecloud Design, which is trying to use a popular game genre for educational purposes, with the aim of making something that’s fun rather than dry as dust.

New to tower defence games? They’re the ones where you (usually) have a base that you have to defend by placing weapons (often in towers) and characters around it, who then have to see off hordes of enemies trying to capture it.

“In Tower Math, the numbers have been turned into monsters and it’s up to the player to save them. To break the spell, children must build magic towers by solving math problems,” explains the app store listing.

There are three kinds of towers – cannon, lobber and lightning – with magic powers including freeze ray and magic rain available. But only after solving sums, of course.

The game has 20 levels to work through, with bronze, silver and gold medals to be earned according to how well your child completes them. Up to five profiles can be saved in the game too, to track progress of different children. Or, indeed, adults: this has the makings of a good intra-family competition.

We’ve seen maths applied to popular game genres before: Medieval Math Battle did a similar thing for roleplaying games, for example. The danger is that the educational version isn’t as fun as the non-educational games in that genre, of course.

Tower Math costs £0.69 for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store. For Android, it’s currently available from Amazon’s Appstore for £0.59.