Visual Math App

We will catch up with our second grade mathematician in an upcoming post. However, in today's post, I want to briefly review a math app for iPhone or iPad. The app is called Visual Math by Wiley Aps and is presented as a great visual learning tool for primary grade students.

Unfortunately, the promise is diminished in the real world experience with this app. Now admittedly, my VSL son had some fun playing with this app but the format is lacking in planning or vision. Below are some screen shots of the app.

Players are moved through a series of activities in rounds of 12 activities each.  Those twelve activities are comprised of the same four or five games.  The games require some basic skills: skip counting, money recognition and addition, pattern recognition, time recognition from analog to digital and shape identification.

While the games are somewhat fun and engaging there is little substance here to extend understanding. In addition, the activities quickly become predictable. A random series of exercises appear on screen. They are too varied in expectation to offer consistent practice. The user cannot chose an activity, such as money, to practice due to the random selection of activities.

As a result of the above limitations, I was disappointed in this app and did not find it to be a very useful instructional tool.  On the positive side, the existence of this app offers hope for the development of better visual math resources for the future.

View this link to see one program offering visual math curriculum and sample lessons for high school algebra.  In our next post, we will revisit our 2nd grade math student as he completes his grid.