Happy App Friday!
This week we practice math with Fiete, soar into the stars with Distant Suns and dive into the topic of how digital text is changing the way we read.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Fiete Math Climber
by Ahoiii Entertainment
Mental arithmetic can be fun! In Fiete Math Climber, children make visible progress. With each correctly solved task, Fiete jumps further up the stairs and collects coins. If the answer is wrong, they jump down one level. Children can then use the coins they collect to unlock cute characters. This is a motivating math app that lets children solve hundreds of math tasks in just minutes.
Distant Suns (VR)
by First Light
Stargazing apps have always been a great fit for mobile devices which have the ability to easily track position, and pairing it with virtual reality is a natural fit. Distant Suns is a polished app (in development on different platforms since 1987!) that contains a huge number of stars, galaxies, constellations, and of course planets and moons which you can view against the sky or zoom in on for a closer look. It also contains neat touches, such as pinpointing the position of the moon landings. The virtual reality mode is optional and mainly for use on a large phone screen.
Digital Text is Changing How Kids Read — Just Not in the Way That You Think
“But since digital reading is still in its infancy, for many adults it’s hard to know exactly what the issues are—what’s happening to a young brain when reading online? Should kids be reading more paper books, and why? Do other digital activities, like video games and social media apps, affect kids’ ability to reach deep understanding when reading longer content, like books? And how do today’s kids learn to toggle between paper and the screen?”
This article makes a couple of important points:
1. Devices don’t shorten our attention spans, they make us less tolerant of being bored. The phone is always there and it can give us something quick and interesting to alleviate boredom. The good news is that it does not make us incapable of enjoying slower experiences like reading books. We just need to make space for them by putting the phone down.
2. Online reading (for schoolwork or other reasons) is an important skill that builds on book reading, but requires even more attention, decision making, integration and comprehension. Good readers on paper aren’t necessarily good readers online, and being able to find and evaluate online information is an additional skill that needs to be developed.
