For a sneak peek at what we are currently tinkering on…

In a remarkably detailed and insightful review:

Mathtopia is a math game that helps with Time Management and Focus, and is recommended to kids ages 5 and up.

I especially appreciate this (bolding is mine)

Mathtopia improves players’ ability to complete short term goals, keeps them from wasting time, and heightens their in-game concentration, as they strive for higher scores, faster times, and more correct answers.

Source: LearningWorksforKids.com

Keep Math Facts Fresh Over the Summer

With summer vacations from school starting, its time to load the family devices with math fact games that keep facts fresh. !!! Check out our guest blog on Edshelf: Facts. Facts. Apps! We tell you about a couple of the ones the kids in our house actually enjoy using. Because when the goal is practice, it doesn’t matter what an app is rated, what matters is that your kids will use it over and over and over again.

Thank Yous!!

We always love to thank those of you who have given us a kind mention (and we love to learn from those of you who have harder feedback)!

In that spirit, thanks to David Kapuler of Technology Tidbits who compares us to Candy Crush and says he “highly recommends checking out Mathtopia”.

And thanks to Learning Works for Kids, which has a great site that evaluates apps based on thinking and academic skills used. I’ve used their tools to find a best fit app for children in our house.

Learning Works for Kids gave Mathtopia an LQ of 8.7 out of ten, with a brain grade of 9 and a fun grade of 8.4. Given our subject matter, math facts, we are pretty proud of those numbers.

Learning Works for Kids says “Mathtopia combines fun, competition and math practice, making it a highly recommended math game for children ages 5 and older.” We were excited to see that they agreed that we had met our development goal: “Mathtopia improves players’ ability to complete short term goals, keeps them from wasting time, and heightens their in-game concentration, as they strive for higher scores, faster times, and more correct answers.”

Best,

–The Team

We are the best of the best and one of the reviewer’s favorite apps “OF ALL TIME!”.

Second graders need their math practice, and Mathtopia lets them have fun while practicing.

Thank you Lifeproof for putting Mathtopia at the top of your back-to-school list!

• Top 5 Back-to-School Apps

It is also interesting that their #3 and #4 apps are slimmed down features of Cardtopia. With Cardtopia you can make and share lesson cards and task/quiz cards in one awesome app.

In fact, their #5 app is a souped up version of a Cardtopia lesson deck made by “Rose”.

We’ve been so busy working on our next product… (more about that later) that we’ve neglected acknowledging some of the nice folks that have invested their time reviewing and commenting about Mathtopia.

• Top 10 apps for common core state standards CCSS math
• Purely Paperless by Teacher Kate

Thank you both so much for your studied praise!

Some kids memorize math facts with ease. Others are skilled avoiders of the task. Our son finds a million things to do, ask, comment on, or look at when asked to work on math facts. The math facts are not one of them.

Our game Mathtopia+ engages his attention until things get hard. Then his avoidance strategies kick in. For the avoider, Mathtopia+ and Mathtopia are best used when math facts mastery is in the phase where facts are getting easier for the learner and to maintain facts already mastered. His avoidance behaviors arise out of a fine motor delay and visual-motor integration challenges. By contrast our high persistence daughter happily plays levels of Mathtopia+ without being discouraged when it gets harder.

For the math facts avoider using a variety of engaging and novel presentations help keep attention engaged. Mathtopia+ and Mathmateer on the iPad engage his attention. Games such as Sleeping Queens, Zeus on the Loose, and even Snap It Up!, available for addition/subtraction and multiplication/division, provide fun and entertaining breaks from traditional methods of memorizing math facts. Combining these games with a reference math table provides the early learner with an opportunity to participate.

For the child who avoids math facts because of fine motor issues, completing math facts tables may be a surprise winner. Filling in tables has been an excellent tool for increasing handwriting speed and reducing memorization anxiety. Students can now visualize the relationships of the facts to each other, allowing him to start incorporating reasoning when presented with a problem he finds challenging, such as recognizing the relationship of near doubles to doubles.

Today’s tip from Marna over at Kirkland Mastery Math, make the table 2 to 13 rather than 0 to 10. For us we started with 0 to 10 to build handwriting fluency. As his handwriting speed improves, we’ll drop 0 and 1 and add higher numbers at the outer edges, gently but steadily increasing his handwriting speed and math mastery.

http://www.kirklandmasterymath.com/

Happy learning,

Mary Oemig