Math educational products like textbooks, games, and TV shows such as Square One and Cyberchase, are often written by people who are “good at math.”  When I say good at math, I mean people who did well in school at it.  It’s an important distinction.  In the United States, math is traditionally taught as a set of procedures to memorize.  To a lot of people, that’s all math is.  People who rise to the top of this system and earn degrees in mathematics don’t see what’s wrong with it, because the system worked so well for them, and so we keep perpetuating much of the same things in math ed.

The thing is, you don’t have to be good at memorizing procedures to be good at math.  You might have to be to succeed on standardized tests, but that’s a different matter.  

I did kind of poorly in math myself, growing up.  I definitely fell into the camp of kids who simply thought “I’m not good at math.”  Now that I’m grown, I realize I need to think about math visually, not as a set of symbols.  For example, I never remember what 3 + 7 is, but I’ve learned to think of it as 4 + 6, which I know is 10.  I suspect the only reason I know 6 + 4 is 10 is because I quickly internalized that 5 + 5 = 10, and I had some years of practice remembering six and four are each one away from five.  Maybe with time I’ll remember by rote that 3 + 7 is 10, but it’s been over twenty years since I was made to memorize the addition facts in school, and it hasn’t happened yet, so we shall see.

When I think of these concepts in my head, I don’t really see the symbols 3 and 7, or 4 and 6, or even 5 and 5.  What I do see are visual representations of five and five.  I simply shuffle the cubes in my mind until they’re organized in clusters I can work with.  If I’m calculating a 15% tip on $35.00, I know I need $1.50 for each of the three sets of $10, and then half of that again (75 cents) for the remaining $5.  $5.25.

What makes the new iPhone game Arithmaroo so awesome is that it supports visual thinking of quantities.  I wish I had made this game!  A similar idea has been kicking around in my mind for a few years, but I had conceived of it a little differently, and I dare say, Arithmaroo is better than what I had thought of.  Bravo!

Playing Arithmaroo is very simple.  The player is presented with different arrangements of numbers, and you are to select the corresponding numeral from the grid at the bottom of the screen.  If right-brain thinkers like me are ever going to succeed at performing math at the speed that symbol-oriented rote memorization thinkers do, Arithmaroo is great exercise.  Equally important, Arithmaroo gives visual thinkers an opportunity to play an overtly mathematical game and experience success.  Hurrah!

And lest you think I’m no good at math, I protest.  My boyfriend may be getting a degree in mathematics, and he may have passed several levels of advanced calculus with flying colors (Who even knew there were different levels of calculus?) but I can run circles around him efficiently packing the dishwasher, a suitcase, or the trunk of a car.  I can also cut a perfectly straight line into a roll of wrapping paper like there was nothing to it.  These tasks are all mathematical, they’re just spatial and not procedural.  I can’t truly comprehend the way some people find spatial tasks difficult, and in this way, I’m not much different from teachers and school administrators don’t understand why some students just can’t seem to do well in math class. Three cheers to Arithmaroo for bringing other ways of thinking about math to a video game for kids!

Arithmaroo is available on the App Store for $1.99.  Today only (Friday 4/23/2010), the game is FREE as part of a special promotion.  Check it out!

At last, it's available on the App Store!  Frogs and Fireflies was approved and made available on April 2nd.  It's a little bit later than I was aiming for, but the nice thing about being your own boss is that you have no one to disappoint but yourself.  We were experiencing some troubles getting the game to run reliably on 2G and 3G iPhones, and it took some time to iron those issues out.

Now it's on to promoting the app everywhere I can think of.  The game has already been reviewed on wired.com, as well as a few different app blogs.

We already have plans to make a few updates to the game, and make it fully support the iPad.  While the iPad is pretty neat device and shows a lot of potential for applications for children, my motivation is actually a desire to increase the visibility of the iPhone app.  As of now, there are approximately 180 educational games on the iPad App Store.  That is, if they all show in the browse by category function.  There are approximately 4,460 educational games in the iPhone App Store, by the same sampling method.  Of course, there are far fewer iPad devices out in the world than iPhone and iPod Touch devices, but if I can catch the attention of iPad owning parents, that might pull up our sales numbers enough to make us a little more visible in the iPhone App Store.  As many iPhone owners and developers are aware, it's easiest to browse the store by what sells the best, which naturally makes it challenging to reach that distinction in the first place.

In addition to iPad support, the next update should include a practice mode, and levels.  After that, we're moving on to create more games!

For more information on the creation of Frogs and Fireflies, see Part 1 and Part 2 in this series.  To try the game, check it out on the App Store!

I recently received a request from zinc Roe Design to review their latest preschool apps; three in a series called Tickle Tap Apps.  It’s always good to keep abreast of the latest kids offerings in the App Store, so I was happy to oblige.  Here goes!

Sort Slider asks players to match full color objects with their silhouettes, one at a time.  You play by dragging the color picture with your finger, or tilting the device until it slides into the correct shadow.  Practicing the skill of observing the shape and characteristics of objects could come in handy in school, because standardized tests often include questions that require careful observation.  To me, this feels more like an academic activity than a game, but then kids in the target age range like school, so this may still hold appeal.
Sort Slider features an adorable dog mascot who provides positive feedback after each correct answer.  He doesn’t talk, but he does bark, and is obviously pleased with the player’s success.
I would place the target age range for this app around 3 years old.  The objects used in the app have distinct shadows that young children should easily be able to differentiate, but this may make it too boring for kids 4 and up.

Count Caddy is another app that features a good educational concept for preschoolers.  Counting games for kids are a dime a dozen, but they usually don’t take the challenge beyond touching items one at a time to hear numbers in sequence spoken aloud.  Count Caddy is a young child’s counting activity done right.  Instead of simply tapping an item to hear a voice count it, the objects appear one at a time, and the player drags it to move it into a collection area.  This allows the child a moment to process the fact that she is adding it to a group. 
What really makes Count Caddy first class among counting apps is that it introduces the concept of counting by twos and threes, sometimes called 'skip counting'.  Counting by twos and threes is a concept kids don’t usually fully understand until kindergarten, first grade, or even later, but I think it’s great to expose preschoolers to topics that are a little advanced for them.  A child as young as 2 could play Count Caddy, because the only action necessary is sweeping items across the screen to the collection area.  In counting by twos and threes, the objects are already lumped together in groups, and the narrator counts by two and three aloud.

Sound Shaker is an app I would only recommend for a very mellow child.  It’s more of a toy than a game, which is not to put the app down in any way.  It’s a noise maker that a child can customize.  There are 6 sounds to choose from.  Once you’ve selected a sound to work with, you tap the screen to make fingertip-sized balls appear that will chime the selected sound when they hit the edge of the screen.  The app has great physics, so you can make a pile of balls and slowly tumble them around.  The one that impacted to make noise gets a star on it so you can see which impact triggered the noise.  Another feature I didn’t discover until the third or so time I played is that you can hold your finger down on the screen to make items that sound at a higher pitch.  A narrator does say about 12 seconds in to "tap the screen longer to make new sounds," but I guess I was previously too busy playing to really listen to her.  I fall into the camp of people that try to tune any narrative I hear out as an annoyance, even though it may be providing helpful information.  That’s OK though.  Discovering this feature on the third play made the game novel again.
I haven’t observed a child play with the app, but it is my fear that the game encourages you to shake the iPhone / iPod Touch vigorously, because sounds are only made when objects collide with the edge of the screen.  To their credit, you can use your finger to fling balls into each other or against the wall, and shaking the device fast does not make the balls move fast.  They seem to have selected a reasonable top speed to discourage rough shaking.  That doesn’t mean a child won’t want to try, though.  It would be all too easy for the device to slip right out of the hand and go flying across the room.  I would recommend this app only to those parents who have a rugged grippy rubber case on their device.

Each of these apps is currently priced at $1.99 in the iPhone App Store.