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We report an exploratory study that examined the educational possibilities through a verbal messaging application (chat), and show that this activity has the potential for effectively teaching mathematical concepts. Communicating in a virtual chat room allows children to become literate, as well as situate themselves in a social environment. Because of the latter possibility, children look forward to this activity with lot of motivation and interest. We modified some rules of the virtual chat room in the Sugar Learning Platform to facilitate development of arithmetic skills like addition, subtraction and multiplication. We present the highlights of this chat room experiment, and outline the insights gained from the analysis of the logs collected over five months from a group of 15 tribal village students (3rd and 4th grade).