I’m going to break Thumper’s advice about “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”. This one, quite frankly, disappointed me. As one of the top Education apps – I thought this would be a stellar math app.
This app has a lot of “stuff” packed into this app but the execution was poorly done and it did not hold my son’s attention like some other apps that practice similar math or writing skills. I’ve included the version information because the reviews and screen captures did not match this latest version I downloaded.
Part of what this app tries to do is to teach your child how to count. Sal can count by 1s, 5s, and 10s so this wasn’t to applicable- but even if he was learning, I wouldn’t use this app to introduce him to these concepts. One of the activities is to “count snowflakes” which has a flurry of snowflakes falling down in a forest scene, and every time you tap the screen you hear some one count up “1, 2, 3” etc. This has NO connection to what the actual number represents.
Writing numbers is another poorly executed activity. If you want your child to work on number writing, try out iWriteWords. This one you fill in an outline. If you touch inside the outline, you “color it in”. if you touch outside the line, it ignores your motion. You do not have a realistic feedback on your motion. Sal happen to see me while I was testing this one out and noticed something weird while I was trying to trace the numbers. He took the phone from me and tried one out – and then started laughing as he noticed that he did not have to “trace” the number at all, he just had to scribble his finger all over to “color in” the outline. Not exactly the activity you might be going for in learning to write a number.
Some of the simple addition and subtraction activities are the “flash card challenge” and the “math puzzle”. Neither were intrinsically fun for Sal like Bingo Bugs were.
This was a big miss for us. Sure you might need to get a couple of other apps to cover what this one tries to cover, but if you’re going to do it, do it right.
Cost: $0.99
