Esa Helttula of iDevBooks is coming out with a new app on October 7th: Visual Fractions Decimals and Percentages for iPad. What I find exciting about his “visual” series of math apps is that they let you explore numeric relationships in an open ended fashion. In other words, they let you experiment with numbers.
This summer I was fortunate enough to meet Esa in person during my family’s summer vacation. After showing us around Helsinki for a day, we sat down for a cup of tea at the hotel. I guess you could call it an “international app meet-up”, because he immediately brought out his iPad to let me preview his work. Esa is an independent app developer living in Finland, with an extensive background in computer science and math education. His family participates with product development, and his apps have been very well received in educational institutions around the globe. Sometimes I think it helps to put a face to a name: here we are outside of the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, shortly before he showed me the latest apps…
Some people call me crazy for making this blog my hobby over the past several years, but Esa is the type of person who inspires me to keep going. You see, apps don’t grow on trees. They are hand-made from the ground up, with hundreds of programming hours that go into each and every tap and swipe. Because of people like Esa, children will have a diverse set of tools for understanding math within reach.
To see his app in action, here is a 1 minute and 43 second demo video. He made it under two minutes especially for you, because he knows parents are short on time. 🙂  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. More information about the app is available on his website: http://idevbooks.com/apps/visual_fractions.php.
Just amazing Esa and thank you Lorraine for sharing this blog!