We like this; needs a few tweaks
4
By dd29mom
Thank you, Mathseeds; in the quest to get my young elementary aged kids their math practice I have been desperately wishing for a platform more interesting than the IXL or MobyMax their school promotes. Like the phenomenal Reading Eggs, Mathseeds provides great skill-building in a fun, game-like platform. The app doesn't provide the same developmental arc or entertainment as the website (a subscription to which I highly recommend - I homeschooled my kindergartner almost exclusively using Reading Eggs and Mathseeds and it was perfectly sufficient for him to enter first grade at level the next year), but as a way to practice skills it has a pretty exhaustive array of different activities and good motivators.
So far my kindergarten son loves it and will play for quite a while. My second-grader, who has ADHD and struggles in math, has to be coerced as he does in all things academic, but seems to find it less tedious than other math activities. The badge and game rewards are decent motivators; I'd like to see more than two games available.
The only thing I am truly unhappy with is that there is no corrective feedback when errors are made. If a wrong answer is given the game simply buzzes you and moves on to the next problem. This is not helpful to a child, who needs to understand where he is in error and then be given an opportunity to fix the problem to ensure a good grasp of the concept.
Also with certain multi-step questions, there is no way to fix a mistake. For example, there are problems where groups must be lined up in sequence. Several times my impulsive child arranged things incorrectly at first glace, noticed his mistake, and would have self-corrected, but the app did not allow it. He had to go ahead and get it wrong, even though he knew what he needed to fix, and lost out on a point and was upset.
I hope in future updates to the app this issue can be addressed. It is too good of an app from too high-quality of an edutainment developer to have a mark against it.
I also would love to see a pre-K version made. My 3yo can do some of the kindergarten one but it quickly gets to be too much and frustrates her.