Showing posts with label division. Show all posts
Showing posts with label division. Show all posts

Monday, July 11, 2011

Rocket Math

I'm way behind on posting about the apps I've found, but talking with colleagues at the end of the school year got me inspired again to post about two math apps we were looking at together, both called Rocket Math. They both give kids practice in routine math helping build the automaticity they need with basic math facts.

One is Rocket Math from the developer Dan Russell-Pinson for $0.99. (There is a free version you can try out.) Personally, I didn't particularly like this one very much at first, but a first grade teacher told me that she's been using it with her class and they all love it. You have to complete multiple choice math problems to earn 'money'. You can choose which operation to work on and the level of difficulty. You use your money to build a rocket, which you then attempt to fly into space on a mission that is also math related. Although the math missions start at an easy level (tap all the even numbers) they cover a wide range of topics. There are 56 different missions. The most advanced ones ask students to do things like identify numbers that are divisible by 3, the equations that have a remainder of 1, or the square root of a given number.  This app allows you to save up to 5 profiles for different students. The profile saves the rockets the student has built, along with the info about the maximum height it reached and the maximum score the student achieved on a mission with that rocket. 

The other app with essentially the same name is Rocket Math HD.  Students can work on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division at three different levels. The first level involves adding single digit numbers, the second is double digit numbers, and the third includes triple digit numbers. Students have to solve four problems correctly and then they can go ahead and try to launch their rocket. The visuals for this reward are great - though I would watch for kids who may choose to get answers wrong in order to see their rocket crash! There is a scratch pad next to the problems so that students don't have to do the math in their head - unlike the other Rocket Math game, this one is not multiple choice. At the simpler level, students could create their own manipulatives to help them with the problems, and at the higher levels they can write out the problems to help them with the necessary regrouping. I'm not a math teacher but the 3rd/4th grade math teacher I was talking to really liked this app. It's not perfect, but the developers have updates planned and it's currently free. Currently (version 1.2) the high score function does not appear to be working, and the settings button does not work.

Neither app has any advertising, neither requires you to be connected to the Internet to play. Both apps have sound effects (which many students like.) Neither has any way for a teacher to check and see what a student has been working on. Students could appear to be working hard but consistently picking the easiest level to work on and not challenging themselves. Still, with free versions of both available right now they're both worth grabbing.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Mathtappers

Mathtappers has a series of FREE  (and ad-free!) apps for working on basic math concepts - addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as well as fractions and telling time. Designed by math educators from the University of Victoria in Canada, each app includes a page of advice to the grownups on who this app is most appropriate for (i.e. what the skills the student already needs to have mastered) and how to introduce it to the kids. They have a webpage that also has some helpful information on it. The designers have used tools that teachers often use in the classroom to help children visualize relationships between numbers (e.g., ten-frames & hundred-frames) and master their fact families (practicing groups of facts together). As they say on their website,
"Even a single shared iPod Touch can be enough to make this type of tool useful in the classroom."
Beautifully done! There are many math apps that are little more than flashcards to be used for memorizing facts, or 'drill and kill' activities. Although those have their place, it is important to have apps like these that promote real understanding of the math too!

MathTappers: Estimate Fractions - designed to help learners to build their intuitive understanding of fractions by helping them to relate fractions (both symbols and pictures) to the nearest half (e.g., 0, ½ 1, 1½, 2, etc.) and then to extend their understanding by challenging them to use fraction estimates in addition and subtraction problems. 

MathTappers: ClockMaster - A variety of options available for helping kids learn to tell the time using both analog and digital clocks.

MathTappers: Find Sums - designed to help learners to make sense of addition (and subtraction as a related operation), and then to support them in developing accuracy and improving their speed.

MathTappers: Multiples - designed first to help learners to make sense of multiplication and division with whole numbers, and then to support them in developing fluency while maintaining accuracy.