In fact, whenever people ask me about good learning apps, I generally tell them that there aren’t many. There are thousands of choices available which claim to be learning games and most of them are junk. What was true in those days, still stands: making tests pretty doesn’t necessarily make them fun. He hated it just as much as I hated the goofy plastic table top game that my mom used to force me to play when I was a kid. We settled on some ridiculous interactive drill-and-kill app with a flashy name and mediocre graphics. I soon discovered that there were dozens of multiplication learning options, all of which were crap. My son needed to memorize his times-tables and he also kept begging to use my smartphone: two birds, one stone. A few months ago at the doctor’s office, however, I downloaded some multiplication-table flashcard game direct to my phone while my 9-year-old and I were waiting for his brother to finish his check-up. I don’t usually have to choose my own games, developers usually send them to me weeks before the actual release. My first experience with shopping for learning games and apps happened recently in a doctor’s office. The landscape of learning games is confusing. The Fight For The Future Of Video Games is a warts-and-all look at the clashes between the video game business and its passionate fans. Hyper-curated in order to facilitate sales, both stores are full of big claims that play on both our naïve belief that computers will eventually be able to do everything and our incessant fears that our children need an academic head start. Likewise, it is extremely difficult to choose learning apps from Apple’s iOS Appstore. There was no way to really evaluate whether or not a game will help my kids learn anything. It was the first time I really looked at it carefully and I was not impressed. Recently, I spent about an hour browsing the Google Play for Education Store. And the hard part is figuring out which games to use, especially considering today’s exploding market for learning games. Of course, it probably won’t work with just any game. The result of playing was a staggering 20.5% improvement after just two hours of self-guided play. The comparison group’s class received the same materials and the same instruction, but didn’t play the game. Third graders played for just 10 minutes per day, 3 days a week, for four weeks.
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