Apple

Published on: May 12, 2011

Bartleby’s Book of Buttons Review

Bartleby book of buttons Bartleby’s Book of Buttons may be the best educational iPad book available.

I don’t say this lightly. There are a lot of books on the iPad that my kids absolutely love. Certainly the Toy Story iPad games would come to my kids’ minds. But that is because the kids have an affection for Toy Story. On sheer quality, Bartleby’s Book of Buttons blows away Toy Story.

Okay, before I get carried away, let me fire out a quick negative. The book is short. You can get though it pretty quickly.

Published on: April 15, 2011

Bookworm on the iPad: Game Review

By Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

We stumbled onto Bookworm on the iPad and did not realize until much later it is a game that was played long before the iPad came out. I think it is a very productive game for children to play. If it is not, I have wasted at least 30 hours of my life. Even if it was not a good, education iPad app, we still would play it, just not as much. It is a deceptively addictive game.

Here’s the deal: The letter tiles on Bookworm, I finally figured out, are random. You take on adjacent tiles to make words. The letters to the word you made disappear and new ones arrive at the top to take their place on the grid. The Scrabble paradigm applies: the bigger the word and the more unusual the letters, the more the points for the word.

After a while, you start getting red tiles. If a red tile falls to the bottom, you lose. Making bigger words in Bookworm helps keep the red tiles off your back. If you don’t like your tile configuration, you can shake up the tiles and rescramble the words. But there is a cost: more red tiles to fight.

Published on: April 12, 2011

eyeMath: Review of Math iPad Application

By Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

eyeMath eyeMath is another educational math iPad application that I really like a lot. Unlike many of the other math iPad apps I have reviewed, eyeMath has a high tech feel to it – great resolution, strong music… just good eye candy for kids.

The idea is simple as the image here suggests. It is multiple choice and players have three minutes to solve the problems. eyeMath gets progressively harder as you move through the game.

eyeMath also has a feature that I absolutely love, a simple thing yet few other math games have it: problems answered incorrectly reappear later until the student gets the answer correct. It is a little thing but if your child has a nagging equation they just can’t get, it might be a while before they see it again in most games. eyeMath allows you to attack this weakness head on.

Published on: April 7, 2011

MathBoard iPad App Review

By Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

Let me first establish my bona fides to give this MathBoard/Math Board iPad app review: I’ve played this with my kids for at least 50 hours. I know this app!

MathBoard is exactly why the Apple iPad is so revolutionary. It is a chalkboard that you can also use a thousand other different ways. It is just better than a chalkboard because it gives the problems to you – lets you modulate difficulty – and allows you to save the results and chart how well you are doing.

The only downside of the MathBoard app is that it is a little more difficult to use than pencil and paper. Your iPad handwriting is just not quite as good and, when it comes to carrying numbers and such, it can be a problem. But I think these difficulties require young learners to be more disciplined about their handwriting and this is probably a good thing.