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Ask Slashdot: Math and Science iOS Apps For Young Kids?
Oyjord writes "I have a very smart and curious 3-year-old daughter. Before anyone tries to derail my query, yes, we get a lot of play time outside with soccer and baseballs, and inside with blocks, Hot Wheels, PlayDoh, etc. However, on the rare occasion that we do sit down with my iPad, I'd like to solicit recommendations for good Math and Science apps for kids. There are hundreds of horribly gender-biased baking apps and Barbie apps for young girls, but they turn my stomach. She has a wonderfully curious mind, and really likes SkyView already, but I feel lost in a sea of pink and Hello Kitty apps."
My 3.5 year olds were doing algebra with fractions without realizing it.
YOu try to solve mazes by putting blocks in the righ place to let the ball roll down. My nephew has played that game since he was 3.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
I have young daughters as well, and I have a similar reaction to Barbie dolls and their ilk, primarily because I don't want my daughters (or my son for that matter) to buy into the whole sexualization/objectification of women mindset. However, I don't reflexively avoid gender-targeted toys. Why should boys and girls have to be indistinguishable in their play preferences? What's wrong with the boys deciding that they like Cars and the girls Disney Princesses, as long as their parents are OK with it?
;)
Don't worry, there are plenty of gender neutral family activities, too. I teach them all to shoot firearms as soon as they're old enough.
Amazing Alex
Angry Birds
Cut the Rope
Dinopedia
Isaac Newton's Gravity HD
Google Earth
Math Bingo
Math Drills
Multiponk
NASA App HD
PBS Kids
Scrabble
The Elements: A Visual Exploration
Tiny Wings HD
TinkerBox HD
WolframAlpha
Word Bingo
The best I've found is MonkeyMath (for math and numbers). My daughter got it when she was 3 and still loves it, a year later.
Bobo Explores Light is an engaging, entertaining and extremely extensive app exploring light and its consequences. Sounds boring or technical, but they've managed to get an amazing amount of content (we forget how much light affects us and how weird it is!) into a very fun package.
Monkey Preschool Lunchbox https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/monkey-preschool-lunchbox/id328205875?mt=8
Of course, the "Cut the Rope" and "Fruit Ninja" games are good in there "can't lose" modes.
Starfall app (same as the website)
PBS.org (warning - essentially streaming video - you need to moderate use of this one!)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. -- James Klass
Why IOS?
Because he's got an iPad.
The iOS app Wind Tunnel is a pretty good simplified fluid dynamics solver. It has air entering one side of the screen, exiting the other, and the sides of the screen are free edges. You then draw airfoils or shapes with your fingers and see how the fluid patterns change. You can tweak quite a few parameters. For instance you can change speed, look at pressure and vorticity plots as well as velocity, and introduce particles to see where they go. He spent a lot of time on getting the visualizations to look impressive.
It's incompressible flow and he said he was forced to sacrificed some exactness (allowing a bit of mass loss vs. the N-S equations in some circumstances) to get the computations to run efficiently on iOS hardware in realtime, so the visualizations are pretty reasonable but the numbers won't be exact. Overall it's a great app with a solid math/science/engineering foundation.
I am so fucking sick of you fucking fanbois having to turn every conversation on it's head so you can fly the flag of your little techno-religious cause. It's just like dealing with a religious zealot, they look for any pause in a conversation to interject their diseased thinking and they'll use any possible fingerhold in the dialog to force their pitons in. It's fucking annoying.
The person owns an iPad. What the fuck is the problem? Stop trying to turn this into another endless iOS vs Android battle. Each has their virtues and I don't give a fucking fuck what you use as long as I don't have to buy it.
Now shut the fuck up.
Slide rules teach lazy approximations.
Abacus should be every child's first toy!
Namco's "Isaac Newton's Gravity" puzzler, she worked through all 100 of the puzzles over about a one year period, with only the occasional help from me.
Minecraft PE, which now that she's older she's getting more into the desktop version instead, but when she was younger I could set her up in creative mode, and it would act simply as an infinite lego set for her. (She also adores real legos as well)
Neither may seem like straight up math or science, but she's picked up some surprisingly well thought out ideas about physics and architecture from both.
The Montessorrium apps, like Intro to Math (and Intro to Letters) she got a huge amount of use from, which while just basic as the names would imply was good around that age.
DragonBox+ is awesome and I highly recommend it, even to adults. It's basically a series of algebraic puzzles, using cards that start off not as numbers.
When she got curious about elements, we picked up the Nova Elements app, which answered her questions at the time pretty well.
Most of the rest of the items we've picked up for her for the iPad haven't been specifically science or math based, though a lot of book style apps. She's a big fan of Curious George, the Bartleby Buttons book/apps, and anything about DIsney's Cars. The new Reading Rainbow app has been great too, as it came out just as she was really starting to read on her own, so it's given her a lot of material to easily choose from.
Just something from personal experience. I got my kid bunch of nice learning software for Android. He loved them, played them, learned a lot.
Then we had our student led parent teacher meeting/conference. Turns out, he doesn't do jack in class because he finds it all too boring. And it is, when he gets to race a car for solving the right question, sticking stuff with glue on paper is rather pale.
Result... he knows his stuff but is "officially" a C grade student. He is in grade 1 so no worries, however I will skip the software to tame his exitment level.
Then we had our student led parent teacher meeting/conference. Turns out, he doesn't do jack in class because he finds it all too boring.
You found out how to make learning interesting for your kid, and because he can't do well in what is ignorantly a boring and mediocre environment, your plan is to dumb down his learning until he can be pacified with the rest of the sheep?
Bad plan. Home school, or find a school that can make things interesting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We (the founders) are French, and based in Norway and France.
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
"European crap"?
From https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2012/01/25/more-crap-from-the-e-u/
"Now that the European Union’s member states are flailing around attempting to implement their miserable cookie directive, the European Commission has decided it’s a good time to retard the Internet some more. Today the European Commission will release an already-leaked new version of the Data Protection Directive which firmly establishes a European right to data erasure, or “right to be forgotten.” Article 17 will give EU residents an unprecedented inalienable right to control and delete facts that were once voluntarily communicated by the subject. Moreover, the right to erasure covers all publications of the personal information."
It's not all bad in the E.U., hence it must be African.